The Work Around The Work
a parable
Gertrud
Last week, I pulled my sourdough starter, Gertrud, out of the fridge where she’s been in a “standby” state for weeks, whispered apologies over her as I pulled off the lid.
As I warmed some water and pulled the whole wheat flour I use to feed her out of the cupboard, I tried to remember when the last time was that I made sourdough of any kind. I couldn’t remember, which tells me that it’s been weeks. Months, I’m guessing.
For quite a while, Gertrud and I had a pretty solid weekly routine: pulled her out of the fridge in the morning, let her warm up, fed her before noon, and by evening she was usually bubbly enough to remove a cup of starter to make a double-batch of English muffins. While she was active I would maybe make a batch of flatbread or something, depending on our desires for that week, but after I had used a sufficient amount she would wait in the fridge until I was ready to enlist her help, again. It was a healthy schedule, it worked for us, and it felt good. It was a ritual.
But life gets in the way, and our routine got interrupted at some point last year. Probably in the summer, when the idea of turning on the oven to do anything sounds less appealing in the heat. And around that time, I experienced my first unsuccessful results with Gertrud. I had left her in the fridge too long and didn’t have enough patience to revive her properly. So I got an insufficient rise, leaving the middles of my English muffins dense and gummy. The first disappointment with Gertrud in the three years since I made her, reminding me of my first attempts at yeast bread years ago, countless “doorstop loaves”. It was pretty demoralizing, and entirely my own fault.
This time, this last week, I was determined not to make that mistake.
I took my time, emptying the “discard” into a separate container (I never waste a drop, if I can help it) and giving Gertrud a solid feeding, setting her in the warm spot at the back of the stovetop to consume and bubble and swell. It took two days of this, but the patience was worth it.
Call me crazy, but I’ve never seen her bounce back faster from a period of neglect, and part of me wonders if it’s because she knows I need her, right now. I need to put my faith in something invisible, partner with a mysterious force, a dark force of fermentation, to make something new. Something delicious.
This batch of English muffins tasted more like triumph than anything I’ve eaten, lately.
The Invisible Craft
I wrote an essay here on The Wildroot Parables last year about something I like to call “pericraft”, and I’ve thought about revisiting the subject ever since but never really found a reason to. Now that I’m taking a hiatus from posting fiction, pericraft has been on my mind a lot.
I may or may not have coined the term, but I define pericraft as the largely-invisible work that goes into acts of creation, the “work around the work”.
In my piece last year, I described it this way:
For a writer, it’s stuff like research, organizing files on the computer, creating outlines, worldbuilding. For artists it’s loose sketching, cleaning and organizing their materials and media, spending time looking at the work of others they admire. For gardeners it’s sorting seeds, emptying old pots of soil, tidying the potting table. For cooks it’s washing dishes, choosing groceries, reading recipes, selecting the right tools to have in the kitchen.
It’s not the actual act of creating the big stuff, the stuff others will see. It’s not writing the novel, working on the painting, planting or nurturing the seeds, or throwing the chopped onions in the pan. But it’s still part of the craft. It’s still essential to the act of creating. It’s the backstage stuff, the stuff that happens at every stage of the creation process.
These are the things that contribute to a kind of muscle-memory, a confidence that you have laid the groundwork for executing, for making, for bringing something to life. It’s the unromantic stuff, but it needs to happen.
Pericraft is, I find, the first thing to vanish when life gets busy. An overwhelmed writer may take shortcuts on outlining and organizing, throwing themselves at the page with no safety net. A busy cook will opt for premade ingredients and meals instead of sifting through their cookbooks and wandering the grocery store for the perfect piece of produce. Every artist and craftsperson has ways of cutting corners when needed.
This isn’t a moral judgment, but a practical one. When you don’t feel that you have time, shortcuts make sense. But the shortcuts almost always come at the expense of the backstage stuff, the unromantic stuff. The building blocks of craft.
Pericraft is often the place where you get to savor the process. But when you are stressed, savoring is the last thing on your mind.
Covering My Head
Sometimes, not always, when I am sitting down to work or heading out to do a task in the yard, I cover my head. Usually with one of my collection of cotton kerchiefs, tied simply over my hair. And while the effect is sometimes aesthetic and sometimes practical, there’s a spiritual component to it that I find vital, yet difficult to explain.
Veiling is a common practice in many faiths and has many purposes in those faiths. It’s said that the Celts, for example, believed that the head was the seat of the soul, and so covering one’s head could be seen as a protective measure, guarding something precious.
In my case, the days when I choose to cover my head tend to be days when I find it really difficult to focus, to keep my feet on the ground. I sometimes feel disconnected. The phrase “head in the clouds” makes sense; I understand that.
When I wear a head covering, the effect is a feeling of finding my footing, of a gentle hand pressing me back down to earth so I don’t float away. It helps me to feel patient, mindful, and present. To focus on what’s right in front of me.
Again, it’s difficult to explain.
I am guilty of trying to do everything at once. I collect hobbies like they’re going out of style, I stack my tasklists deep and wide. And it isn’t until I stop—whether by choice or not—that I realize how much I was neglecting the things I truly enjoy in favor of “having it all”.
This hiatus I’m taking right now from posting fiction over on Talebones feels like another kind of head covering, a difficult-to-explain revelation bringing my feet back down to earth and showing me all the ways I’ve bypassed my own pericraft. Somewhere along the line, I stopped savoring the processes that make me feel whole: my neglected sourdough starter, the garden ready for my attention, the emptying cup of my creativity without filling it up, the “stuff around the stuff” that builds a proper foundation for creation to occur.
You can’t rush the good processes, the fermentation and the germination and the imagination. You simply can’t. You can take a shortcut for a little while, but it doesn’t last. Eventually, you must come back to the place where nothing is hurried. You must sit at your desk and let “nothing” happen. You must wait for the rise. You must wait for the seed to burst open in the darkness of the soil. It takes time.
In the dark womb of “nothing”, something is always waiting to live.
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I love the idea of pericraft. It's an idea we don't talk about enough as creatives, as it tends to get lost amidst the narrative of "cranking out a novel in the hour before breakfast and rushing off to work." For many years, I would block every hour of the waking day on my calendar, scheduling "writing" first thing in the morning. I thought it meant I was prioritizing my craft.
But... between writing, work, exercise, and general life, I was "booked" from 7am-8pm. At first it worked... I was able to draft a novel... but once that was done, I was completely burnt out. I blame not leaving any time for pericraft. Sure I was writing everyday, but once my creative stores were spent, there was no room in my schedule for replenishment.
Lately I've been putting "do nothing" on my calendar to ensure that I have room for my brain to rest and be open to creative inputs. I think I'll start labeling these blocks pericraft from now on. Thank you!
I really enjoyed your thoughts on pericraft and on head covering. There's something weirdly comforting about having your head covered, and it reminds me of how I always used to hear my hood up to give presentations in school (probably a little unprofessional looking, not that it mattered then). It also makes me think of all the little actions by which you signal to yourself that you are entering another zone or phase of the day, one where you'll do a particular thing, like bowing at the beginning of jiu-jitsu class.