Catherine Swanner

As I was searching for an authentic, non-performative way to write about my projects on this website, I hit on a series of three questions-to-self that I found generative in the moment, and that I now want to ask of every project I do. My hope is that asking these questions will help me clarify my intentions; documenting the responses will give me a touchstone I can return to as the project develops.

The questions are:

Why am I writing this?
What does completion look like?
How will I share it?

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1) Why am I writing this?

I usually begin any project because I have either a question, or a curiosity, eg:

What is the significance of ___________?
What would happen if I tried to express an idea in _______ way?
What do I think about ________? How should I approach _________?
If I write _____, what will it end up looking like?

Asking myself, why am I writing this, is about ensuring I can articulate those emotional, creative, or intellectual questions. The questions themselves don’t need to be highbrow: I’m writing a whole chapbook based on the question of, what if I just wrote a poem like this every week? But they do need to be there. I can subsist creatively on a good question for a long time.

Sidebar: Goals are powerful, but they’re not questions. Desires are very powerful. I think many desires are questions articulated at a slant.

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2) What does completion look like?

At my corporate job we often ask, what does success look like, and the answer is usually something like, our customer satisfaction scores improve. My art practice is less concerned with quantifiable success, but I think it is helpful to ask myself: how will I define "complete," and what are the criteria by which I can say, yes, this is complete, and I have achieved what I meant to achieve with it? Because I struggle with perfectionism, I’m finding this question helps me focus on my energy on realizing a few, chosen, meaningful ambitions.

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3) How will I share the work?

I’m often reluctant to share my work. I get overwhelmed by the capacity of the concept of “sharing.” Is “sharing” about publishing in lit mags, finding a literary agent, promoting myself online, having a newsletter, keeping up on social media, or something else? I hope that this question can help me cut through the noise and focus on: what are the tangible containers that I’m going to put this work in, and what is my plan for sharing those containers? ‍

Two podcasts about the idea of containers that I've found helpful:

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