J. Maxwell on “Drinking in Montreal”
I started writing “Drinking in Montreal” years after the actual trip I took with my brother and his wife. Like most of my poetry and short stories, I had not set out to write about what eventually formulated on the page. But unintended threads often turn out to be the ones most worth following.
Writing, at least in my experience, comes down to two indispensable aspects. The most important component of it all involves simply “showing up,” that is, carving out a set time for yourself during the day that’s dedicated solely to writing and nothing else. For me, that’s an hour in the early morning before the rest of the household wakes up. It’s a habit that has held strong for many years by this point. Before that, I had done so during my lunch break at work, and before that, I made a fruitless stab at writing in the evenings. My lunch breaks too often came and went with a rushed frustration, and by nighttime, I was too exhausted to offer any real focus on work. And so, morning won out, the creative appetites coursing most rampant and famished in those hours when the world is still half asleep.
This brings us to the second significant facet of writing: sometimes less is in fact more, at least when it comes to applying critical thinking in the beginning.
The medium should serve as a sort of meditation where effectively the writer thinks less but feels more. My greatest hope when I get up to write is that at some point I will disappear into the page so that it’s less me sitting at the dining room table in a relatively unforgiving oak chair with my mug of coffee, and more a simple exchange of language onto paper, becoming a conduit for the craft.
I know to some this will sound like a load of overblown crap, and perhaps it is, but it’s the way I’ve come to (not) think about writing over the years. It’s also why I believe the early morning works best for writing, when the self has not yet been bruised by the driving elements of the day to come and all there is to do is shake off the spectral cobwebs of dreams and get to work.
This certainly does not imply that I plow through each and every session without distraction. Not in the least, considering how ample and alluring they can be. The same phone murmuring Bill Evans over Spotify can easily become an inspiration annihilating source of distraction in unmindful hands. It has lain ruin to more well-intentioned mornings than I’d like to admit. There’s almost always at least one other more immediately engaging mental escape in the room. More often, there are far too many to count that soon the very enumeration itself becomes the source of distraction. I’m sure more than a few will relate to what I’m getting at here.
Some advice: Give yourself some grace. But also remind yourself that you still showed up after going through all the trouble of carving out the time for yourself. Why would you waste it doing anything else?
It was during one of these quiet, thoughtless mornings that the poem began to take form.
So, in “Drinking in Montreal”, the narrator becomes suddenly lost, before running into two escorts who inform him that his hotel has been right under his nose the entire time. Overjoyed at finally finding his way, he plants a kiss on the cheek of one of the women, an interaction he says his brother still laughs about years later.
The poem explores a moment plucked from simpler times as the narrator and his brother look back and laugh after years have passed and situations have changed. There’s a profound yearning to return to the days where meandering lost through the streets of another country felt acceptable. And of course, what greater host to such a sentiment than Canada? I can’t think of any better.
