Everything is the Work with Poet Ricki Cummings
Plus we're giving away books of poetry!
on practice
It’s not because Ricki and I go way back to passing poems folded into notes in the hallways between classes that I’m so excited about this guest post and collaboration, it’s because I too fully believe that everything is the Work. Living is the Work. Existing is the Work. Whether we write it down, draw it, or directly use whatever it is is irrelevant. As long as we’re breathing, we’re still creating. And so many of us are very, very hard on ourselves when we’re not actively writing things down or making things because we forget that we are not machines and that whatever we are doing, we are still doing the Work.
Ricki Cummings is a trans writer currently living in Chicago. Her most recent books are The Failure Experiment (2025) and confessions from a drainage ditch (2023). She is the author of the chapbooks A Void and Cloudless Sky and Hypersigil. Her work has been published in Poetry, Vallum, Court Green, Calibanonline, Solstice Literary Magazine, Columbia Poetry Review, and Allium, and has been shortlisted for Vallum’s Award for Poetry. She received her MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago.
On Practice
I should make one thing clear: what I have is not a practice so much as a set of guidelines that I attempt to sort-of adhere to, and it's a combination of two ideas, one interpolated from several sources such that I may have actually synthesized my own idea, and one specific one.
The former is Everything Is The Work. If you're an artist of any sort, but specifically a writer, everything that's going into your head, everything that you're turning around and mulling and stewing on, every little scrap you collect or write... that's part of doing The Work. Writing isn't always sitting down and banging out 4000 words or an entire sonnet, sometimes it's the act of noting the way the sun looks at a certain time of the year, or spending time you should be writing suddenly researching firearms from 1836 or the gravity on Mercury, or just staring at the wall while your brain chews on all those things.
More importantly, those things don't have to be done at a particular time of day. Strict adherence to schedule is great for some people. Other people slip a day and the whole thing goes to shit. Give yourself leeway. You're still doing The Work. Are you breathing? Then you're Working.
The latter idea, the specific one, is the daily routine of author Ursula K. Le Guin, who wrote that her day looks like this:
5:30 a.m. – Wake up and lie there and think.
6:15 a.m. – Get up eat breakfast (lots).
7:15. a.m – get to work, writing, writing and writing.
Noon – Lunch.
1:00 – 3:00 p.m. – reading, music.
3:00 – 5:00 p.m. – correspondence, maybe housecleaning
5:00 – 8:00 p.m. – make dinner and eat it
After 8:00 p.m. – I tend to be very stupid and we won’t talk about this
Note how little of it is actually structured. She is awake for almost two hours before actually sitting down to "work." Her afternoon/evening seems to be very little "writing" "work," but considering that reading feeds the writer brain, that music feeds the general creative brain, that correspondence and connection keep us grounded in our position of community (usually of fellow artists) and is still writing in the strictest sense. (Housecleaning I still haven't found a Work connection for, but I assume it's in there.)
But then there's that last one. "I tend to be very stupid and we won't talk about this." One could reasonably make the argument that Le Guin was a de facto genius. Yet she still puts in her schedule a time for her "stupidity." Is that because she's decided that's the time all the stupid happens? No, that's the time she has observed when the stupid happens. Much like grammar, Le Guin's routine is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It's what works for her.
Now, like I said, I have no practice as such. I'm writing this on my laptop I bought for grad school (has it already been six years since I finished?), in a plaintext editor on Linux, an operating system I've only recently switched to. This is far from my "normal" setup. And yet, here I am. Working. Some people get precious about their tools, their time. But none of that matters so much as just Doing The Work. And so many artists will tell you that there's One True Way to do it, but fuck them. That's for their work. William Stafford would get up a six AM and immediately start writing, every day, for his entire adult life. Hell, even Le Guin got up at 5:30. All I do is remember that it takes a couple hours for my brain to spin up to operating speed, and from there I try to write in the morning, do socializing and leisure in the afternoon, and get some real rest in before bed. At any point in there I reserve the right to stupidity.
You get to set your own schedule. If you only get time to work at lunch or during your work breaks, do that. Stephen King wrote most of Carrie in the lunchroom at a laundry service he was working at. But you can bet he was working out plot while moving shirts into the drying machine. Thinking up lines. Probably a little being stupid, too. The important thing is that you get something, anything, done, because It's All Part Of The Work. The details are unimportant.
You are you. Be you.
-Ricki Cummings
excerpt from Hypersigil
by Ricki Cummings
All this time I thought your name
meant “earth”.
Instead, your name is my name
but older.
We are both prone to madness
and shadow,
cave-ins and strained backs
from lifting our lungs
when no one else could.excerpt from The Failure Experiment
by Ricki Cummings
Inside the solar plexus lies ganglia and the word. Scales fall from my eyes and are replaced with coax cable and copper traces. I think therefore you are; this cybernetic solipsism is only fibrous networks, only logic giving rise to what electricity thinks is love: salt water, silicon, and neuropeptides.
special offer
Ricki and I are giving away some cool shit.
For free!
In case that wasn’t clear. Enter your information on this form by April 25, 2025 and you will be:
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Sent a free zine, Thank You, by Libby in the mail (pending stock).
Entered into a drawing to receive one free book of Ricki’s poetry: Four copies of Hypersigil (2019) and four copies of Ricki’s brand new collection The Failure Experiment (2025) are up for grabs.
Just a little about the production of Hypersigil as a book object
Back in 2019, when Libby was learning letterpress printing and book binding at the University of Iowa Center for the Book, she, Ricki, and artist Jessica Wagar collaborated on this really, really gorgeous hand-typeset, letterpress printed, and handbound book, if she (Libby) does say so herself.
invitation to collaborate
What art, writerly, mind-body, or life practice are you leaning into? What does your writer life look like? What were the inspirations for your favorite works? What does poetry mean to you? If you’d like to share about your creative, poetic, spiritual, well-being, or otherwise living life practices, please get in touch, unraveling, unmoored seeks collaborators. More info can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.
Simply adore Rikki's practice. Love love love everything here. Thank you for that. I needed it.