TM: Talk about this working part-time. You know the Great American Dream is to have a three- or five-car garage, a big SUV that can force anybody off the road, the fanciest house in town, and you are consciously pushing all of that away and saying part-time janitor work at a school in Wausau is enough income for me to do what I want to do.
MK: I had all that stuff in my 20s. I was married for about four years when I was in the Navy. We owned a house three or four of those years. I had all those things, and I didn't want them; it's easy to fall into things. I wanted to have time to write. It didn't help that the person I was married to had very little in common with me. She was a wonderful girl and I have nothing disparaging to say about the institution of marriage. But she was someone I had nothing in common with, and it wasn't for me. I realized: "Why am I working for fifty-plus hours a week to pay for all this stuff I don't care about, when what I want is in a different direction?" Amicable divorce. "Good-bye, Joanne. Good-bye, Navy. Good-bye, house. I'm going to take my time and money and go do something else." There were no children involved, which is a fortunate thing.
TM: Was it wrenching to leave behind everything you'd known?
MK: Scary and fearful, because all you'd known was the ten years of the service. I went in the Navy right after high school, so that was all I knew. In my life, it's like any kind of change - the tack on my chair has to be sufficiently sharp to motivate me to overcome the fear. If the pain overcomes the fear, then I'll make a change - maybe for the positive.
TM: Talk about your working methods. You go to work in the afternoon. You reserve the morning for your writing. You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom, and then what?
MK: I get up in the morning and start the coffee, brush my teeth, then sit and drink half a pot of really strong coffee for two or three hours in the morning while I sit in the recliner and stare at the hummingbird feeder and work on a poem. I'll have it on a little clipboard. Usually most of my time is spent tinkering with revisions.
As I came to be a more relaxed, peaceful person mentally and spiritually, I developed this wonderful capacity for patience, where I would sit and tinker with a poem for ten or twenty hours. Which sounds like a lot, but it's not. You've got this poem and you work on it two or three hours a day, every morning. Two weeks go by and you've got twenty hours into it and it's done.
For me, since a lot of the poems are memory poems, I'm taking the puzzle and dumping all the pieces out on a piece of paper, and then picking out the pieces that don't fit. It's a puzzle with extra pieces. I'm tinkering with fine-tuning the language.
TM: And that takes you until ten o'clock? Noon?
MK: Time to eat, yeah. It's a very relaxing, peaceful, pleasant, joyous process for me. Writing is bliss.
TM: And then you go to work. How does that complement or contradict the mood you develop during the morning?
MK: It doesn't. I can only write for so long. You get burned out. During these hours in the morning, I get up every fifteen or twenty minutes and pour some more coffee, maybe nibble on a cookie, do something around the house - I take little breaks, mini-breaks. You can sit in a chair and be entirely in this focus, this grudge match, for only so long. After two, three, four hours, I'm coffee'd out and pretty much fried mentally. Exhausted. Then I go to work and I have this wonderful, mindless job. I'm a part-time janitor in an elementary school. Physical labor is great. Light physical labor is a wonderful thing. I'd recommend it for anybody who is a scholar or writer or in other sedentary activities. You need balance. I'm just as happy chanting while driving to work as I am writing or mowing the lawn. But I've had mental jobs like editing a newspaper or as a TV newscaster, and they pretty much used up my mental energy for the day. I'd be numb when I got home. Who wants to write then?
Continued in Part 3, next....
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