The Challenge of Being Where Your Feet Are

…When the writing happens somewhere else.

May 19, 2025

My greatest strength as a writer is my imagination. It’s also one of my greatest flaws as a human.

Like most writers, I am blissfully comfortable in my own head. That’s where the magic happens. I weigh new ideas, build worlds, craft sentences. I am constantly pondering: What if? What then? Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve felt as though I’m constantly dreaming from the moment my eyes open to the minute they close at night.

A great deal of this is good. Welcome, even.

Until it isn’t.

Say, when someone is trying to engage in conversation, or I’m trying to pick out fruit at the grocery store, or my toddler is showing me a teeny-tiny ant crawling on a teeny-tiny finger.

I immediately wrestle my imagination back down to earth like a child wrangling a helium balloon. I bend to coo over this little marvel, this tiny insect crawling over the new ridges of a toddler thumb like a mountain range, and for four beautiful minutes I am silent and present and content. Until I start thinking of a world where toddlers are giants and what if they shrink as they age instead of growing and what then—

Then I yank the imagination back and begin the process of being present all over again.

It’s always been a problem, but lately it seems so much harder. I have profound hearing loss, and the worse my hearing gets, the easier it is to live in the silence of interiority. And the worse the world seems to get, the more I long to retreat.

Plus, parenting an 18-month-old is often an exercise in lovingly layered mundanity. Yes, my darling, that is a TRUCK. Yes, it goes VROOMVROOMVROOMVROOM. Yes, my little lamb, that is a BANANA. Yes, that is a BERRY. Yes, that is your YOGURT, my love, my treasure, my whole beating heart, which I see you have somehow applied to your entire face like a sheet mask. Let me gently scrub your face, my little one. Let me do it all over again for lunch.

But it is mundanity I desperately, desperately want to be present for. I do not know the last time I will be asked to reconfirm the word banana or when the sound of an arriving UPS truck will end its siren-song hold on my toddler. Time is fleeting, time is passing, time I’ll never get back, and yet some days it unfurls before me in long, identical, drawling strands, and then I feel my mind start the old What if? and What then? before I snap it back, refocus my gaze, tousle some hair, begin again.

To write about the world requires we live in it—really live, not constantly escape into a fantastical one. But it also requires an imagination to be able to depart and detach from this grim world in order to imagine a new one.

How can writers strike that balance? How can anyone?

I’m really asking here, because I’d love to know.

But if any of you feel like you’re in the same boat, here’s what I’ve been doing in the meantime:

Utilize my five senses. Turns out this age-old writing trick is just as good for the writer as it is for the reader. What am I seeing, what am I smelling, what textures can I feel? What compels my senses about this particular moment in time?
Find the new in the now. Today the tiny unfurling leaves on the birch trees are just a little bit bigger than they were yesterday. The shock of new greenery outside my window is finally starting to overtake the winter brown. The robins are here again and the ravens have left, called to greener scavenging pastures outside the city. Noting all these little changes helps me feel more present and grounded in the here and now.
Communicate what I’m working on to my loved ones. Some drafting days require more dreaming than others, especially when a project is new and enticing. If we can’t beat it, we can at least apologize for it. I’ve found a little “Sorry, I’m trying to puzzle out a plot hole today,” or “I can’t stop thinking about this essay idea” goes a long way.
Be mindful of my mental wanderings. It’s the simplest strategy but also the most effective. I try to stay vigilant about noticing when my mind wanders so I can quickly tug it back. I don’t beat myself up for transgressions. I know my imagination is still one of my greatest strengths, even if right now isn’t the time to use it. I just make a note of what avenues my brain was trying to explore so I can return it to them later. And then I re-enter the present.

Please feel free to share any tips you have for being more mindful and present—I know I’d love to read them, and I’m sure other readers would, too.

Until next month—

Keep writing,

Nicki

June Calls for Submissions

Spotlight Pick

The Passionfruit Review: “Here and Now” submissions

Here’s a call that seems tailor-made for this month’s newsletter: “For this contest, we are calling for love poems that engage with the world around us, with the here and now,” explain The Passionfruit Review’s editors. “We want to read everything about the world around you, from the domestic to the global. Send us poems about your kitchen table, your favourite tree, the cracks in your ceiling; send us your existential dread, your nascent optimism, your pains, your fears, your comforts and your commute. Tell us what it means for you to exist in the world at this moment in time.” Send poems up to 40 lines. First prize is £400 (roughly $530), second prize is £75, and third prize is £25. Entry fee: £3 per poem (roughly $4) or £5 for 3, but writers are encouraged to contact the journal’s editors if submission fees prevent them from entering the contest. All entries will be considered for future publication.

Deadline: June 7th

The Gilded Weathervane: Submissions on rural living

This literary journal from FarmGirl Press publishes “poems, stories, essays, artwork, and photography that is grounded in the beauty and experience of rural living in its variety of expressions.” Send four to six poems or prose up to 3,000 words; flash-length stories and essays are also welcome. “Work relating to fall and winter, loosely or boldly, is appreciated,” write editors. No submission fees, no payment that I can find.

Deadline: June 1

Quartet: Poems by women age 50 and over

Quartet, an online poetry journal that publishes works from women poets over age 50, is currently seeking submissions for its fall issue. Send up to three poems. No submission fees, no payments.

Deadline: June 1

Southern Humanities Review: Poems of witness

For its annual Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, Southern Humanities Review will award $1,000 and publication to a winning “poem of witness.” The prize honors poet Jake Adam York, who died of a stroke at age 40, “leaving behind a body of work that bears witness to our difficult past, and, as all great poems of witness do, lights a way toward understanding.” The guest judge for 2025 is Nicole Sealey. Send up to three poems. The entry fee is $15, and all entrants will receive a copy of the issue in which the winning work appears. A select number of finalists will also be published. The results will be announced in August.

Deadline: June 1

Superpresent: “Discomfort” submissions

For an upcoming issue, the quarterly magazine Superpresent seeks submissions that have to do with its chosen theme of “Discomfort.” Send up to three poems (one per page) or 500-2,000 words of prose (essays or short stories). No submission fees.

Deadline: June 1

L’Esprit Literary Review: 2025 Clarissa Dalloway Prize for Short Prose

For this contest, L’Esprit Literary Review will award $500 to the best work of fiction, nonfiction, or a hybrid genre under 5,000 words. The work need not relate in any way to Virginia Woolf or Mrs. Dalloway. Diane Josefowicz will judge. A $100 prize for second place will also be awarded. Entry is $10 and includes a digital copy of L’Esprit; the fee can be waived via email if it presents a hardship.

Deadline: June 8

Burrow Press Review: Submissions on “excess”

Send fiction or nonfiction up to 10,000 words relating to the theme of “excess” to Burrow Press Review. No submission fees. Payment: $100. Note that accepted works will be published in 2026.

Deadline: June 30

Keep Writing

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