Ending Writer's Block in Our Lifetime: a guest blog by Jon Obermeyer

Eventually, science finds a cure: polio, smallpox, measels, whooping cough, rinderpest (look it up), all gone. Eventually, those ladies and gents in the white lab coats wielding pipettes will get around to the debilitating condition known as Writer's Block.

Imagine if Big Pharma spent $1 Billion and 14 years of R&D effort, just like they do on allergy medicine and mood lifters: "Ask your doctor if Narrativa is right for you. Narrativa is a fast-flow, editor-inhibitor (FFEI) that works in your bloodstream to initiate poetry, prose, and young adult fiction. Side effects of Narrativa include job loss, missed meals, laptop battery wear, comma splices, and of course, death. For impoverished literary journal writers and creative writing program faculty adjuncts, Pfizer may be willing to subsidize the cost of your Narrativa dosing.

Maybe it's my undiagnosed, adult-onset ADD, but I rarely have a problem with writer's block, a daunting blank page, or picking a topic. I read a lot and that helps. I was recently reading a small Joan Didion book "South and West: From a Notebook" (2017), and she had a line in there about the prevalence of mattresses secured to car rooftops in Mississippi in the 1970's. So, I immediately created a blank Word document and wrote "Mattresses" as the title and saved it. I'll come back to it later to riff on the initial visual, and credit Didion of course.

One Saturday evening, I was reading a profile of an eighty-year old female playwright in The New Yorker, and I looked at the photograph and thought, "this could be my mother." So I immediately started a short story with the premise that my mother broke off her engagement with my dad in 1957 (which meant she didn't conceive me in 1958), and pursued her talent as a pianist and arranger for gospel quartets. In my story, her prescient career move, her talent and her perfect pitch, will land her in the middle of the 1960's folk-rock music scene in Los Angeles, whe she will link up with a fictional version of Michael Omartian, a Christian music producer famous for his work with those heathens, Steely Dan.

With this storyline, I now have a second story. What happened to my father after that break-up? How would his life turn out? And then, with genius and care, I will bring my not-mom and my not-dad back together at their 50th college reunion in 2007 in Santa Barbara (my parents divorced in 1978 and actually did go to their college reunion together).

The next morning, eating an Everything bagel, I was back in The New Yorker, trolling. I read a piece by the art critic Peter Schjeldahl about the opening of an exhibit by the Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbaran and Zurbaran's painting, the biblical "Jacob and His Twelve Sons" (1640-45), the dozen offspring who became the twelve tribes of Israel. I have two adult daughters; what the hell would it be like to raise twelve sons? I brought the Jacob story fast-forward from the Book of Genesis to the present day. I imagine Jacob's front yard strewn with the detritus of Big Wheels, Schwinn Stingrays and Triumph 500cc motorcycles. I make him a grocer because going to the grocery store for 18 people (the total household) became burdensome for both wives ("90 minutes just in the check-out line"), so they just built their own family Piggly-Wiggly location in back of the house.

So much for this flood-tide of material, most of it based on tiny prompts and snippets I read about or overhear. Is what I produce so prolifically any good? The jury is still out. I happen to think the quality is as high as ever; I'm just undiscovered, right?

What I do know is that I have a clipboard next to my writing desk, with a handwritten list of sixteen potential writing projects, poems, stories, plays, books that I'd like to tackle, and I'm sure I will, eventually. The one problem I don't have is writer's block.

Jon Obermayer is a Durham, NC poet, short story writer, essayist, editor and ghostwriter. He is a native of Santa Barbara, and a former resident of Potrero Hill in San Francisco.