A WRITER'S ALCHEMY

Not the Heart, But Maybe

2012-02-14T15:47:00.000-08:00

Not the heart, but maybe
the liver. Why not love you
with my whole pancreas?

My thalamus adores you.

My cochlea lies awake all night
filled with you as if by an inner sea.

My kneecaps ache, in dreams
pursuing you with the runner's pure desire.

My heart?

She has gone to dwell
within herself, abbey, abbess
dedicated to her four chambers.

She kneels to pray for purer thoughts
than love of you.

CALYX Journal: Winter 2012, Vol. 27:1

2012-02-07T15:47:00.000-08:00

The new issue of CALYX: A JOURNAL OF ART AND LITERATURE BY WOMEN is now out, featuring my poem, "The Apple Orchard."

It's a terrific issue, and all the more notable for marking 35 years of continuous publication.

Here are a couple of recent pictures of the orchard -- damaged by the recent snowstorm.

Tales from Class

2012-02-06T16:15:00.000-08:00

In class today, I showed clips from another movie (Twelve Monkeys, directed by the brilliant Terry Gilliam). I had this impression that students were rolling their eyes. Okay, they seemed to be thinking. But that's fiction. We're supposed to be writing true stories.

So what is it that makes us feel that true stories offer us less choice, less opportunity for creativity than do fictional stories? Maybe, in some strange way, true stories offer us more choices, more opportunities.

Last Monday, for instance, I told my students how, when I was younger, I wrote stories that I resolved by having the protagonist (a thinly disguised me) dissolve into tears. Back then, I had so much to learn about story-telling.

"Tears," I informed my students, "are not a resolution to a story. Tears resolve nothing."

But the very next day, over coffee, a friend told a story about almost missing a train. She was young and our setting is Chicago, probably in the late 1950s. She had a big suitcase and she needed to catch a bus so she could get to the train station. But every bus that passed her was already full. None of them stopped. Finally, realizing she could never get to the train on time, she began to sob.

A policeman on horseback stopped and asked her what the matter was. He stopped a cab -- an occupied cab -- and directed the driver to take my friend to the train station. She continued to sob in the cab. She offered to pay for her fare, but the other passenger wouldn't hear of it.

She arrived at the train station, still crying, and began running after the train, which was already pulling out of the station. A conductor saw her -- I would guess because she was such a bedraggled tear-streaked mess by this time -- and stopped the train for her.

All because she cried.

And maybe because she was a beautiful, red-headed teenage girl.

I will be mulling this story over for a while (that story and a child-rearing book I once read, Tears and Tantrums by Aletha Solter, who makes a compelling argument for the resolving power of tears). I hope that my friend will suddenly get the itch to put her story down in all its detail (I've tried to keep it stripped down, as it is her story and not mine). She was catching the train to go to her sister's, but in the novelization I have a feeling a handsome stranger will materialize. (Either way, I'd love to hear more!)

Not sure what year this is,

2012-02-04T09:00:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure what year this was taken, recent but not too recent (as that's Dad shoveling snow). I am at the farm now, checking my email -- and on-line class, and writing this post--while Mom showers.

Last night I started rereading Jack Bickham's Scene and Structure, all stuff that I already know (haven't I been teaching short stories and novels for twenty years now?), Chekhov's musket-on-the-wall. But Bickham does a nice job of reminding me that stimulus and effect matter even at the sentence level. I talked with my students about this during workshop this week.

In a composition class it makes perfect sense to write: "Alice went to the circus because her best friend wanted her to." But in a story class, we absolutely must learn to put the stimulus first.

"Alice, if you're really my friend, you'll go with me."

"I hate circuses. Those elephants in chains. Women swinging around at the top of the tent -- you know I'm afraid of heights."

"But Brett is going to be there. That tall boy from math class."

"Then go with the others. Go with the group he's going with."

"I won't be brave enough to talk to him if my best friend isn't there."

***

Okay, that's what I'm thinking about.

And I'm thinking about how growing up on a farm on Elk Creek road in Lewis Co.,Washington, shaped me into this stubborn and slow-learning creature that I am.

Another farm picture...

2012-02-01T13:30:00.000-08:00

This is from the hill overlooking the house. The hillside is much more grown up in trees now.

For Sale

2012-01-30T13:36:00.000-08:00

"The best part of a farm is the poet's..." -Thoreau

The best part is the poet's, and I get to keep the memories, and dreams, and pictures -- not to mention the poems -- but I have a persistent fantasy of buying the family farm and turning it into a writers' colony.

This farm was timber once, a quarter-section, a pie-shaped wedge between Deer Creek and Elk Creek in Lewis County, Washington. Around 1920, my grandparents bought it. My mother was born in this house and has lived here almost all her life, all except her first few years of marriage. I was six months old when she moved back; my brother was two and a half. Back then the house had a long front porch with flower boxes and sweet pea vines. My dad loved this farm. He would never, never have left.

So far, the only people to make a serious offer on the place wanted it for the timber. Wouldn't it be nice if a family wanted to raise their children here?

Or...two horses, a big dog, a writing studio in the orchard.

A Homemade Life

2012-01-25T15:11:00.000-08:00

I just visited Molly Wizenberg's blog, as I occasionally do. It's a food blog, but I came across this post, about writing.

http://orangette.blogspot.com/2011/12/in-my-better-moments.html

Here's an excerpt: "When I’m writing, when my fingers are moving over the keys and words are marching across the screen, I don’t worry. Physically, I can’t worry; there’s no space for it in my head. I wish I could remember that more easily, so that I could choose to write first, rather than worry."

An old poem...first published in CROSSCURRENTS, 2001

2012-01-22T09:21:00.000-08:00

WOOD SONG

Ambulances sang white up our creek road,
a red thread that pulled us
from our play. My mother watched,
a logger's wife, her life
waiting for the telephone's
alarming ring. Her fear
caught in my throat. At three
I followed her from room
to room, her pregnant looming body
hushing questions, "Will you die,
Will you die?" I dreamed our house
burning as I stood, sinewy among alder switches
growing on the clearcut hill
while flames licked boards known to me
as my own bones. I woke
one midnight to see my father
knit among burning trees--
were these visions dredged from a pond
of dream? Real?
What siren called out from those woods,
drew our four generations
to trudge in their caulk boots
its wet winters, its summers struggling
with fire for an acre of trees?

For all my mother's worry,

that white car never carried my father down.

He walked up our graveled drive

August hoot-owl days alive,
alive as everything, bigger than movie cowboys.
He sat on the cement stoop
to children wrestling
over the unlacing of his boots, tousled
our red- and tow-heads. Father,
Mother, the growl for supper and later
the quarreling of dishes in a settling house.

draft of a new poem

2012-01-20T09:24:00.000-08:00

I wake from a dream of packing.
A nightmare of packing. I can't find
my tennis shoes. The pants
are the wrong size.
Where's my toothbrush?
Whose house is this?
My daughters are young.
They find my wedding dress and pull it
from its box, layers of taffeta
everywhere, like drifts of snow
I have to wade through to find the suitcase
empty again. I need a pair
of blue jeans. I need riding boots,
though I'm not sure why.
I need a weather forecast for where
I'm going. Someone spills makeup
over what clothes I've managed to assemble.
Everthing -- unfolded, damp.
The plane will leave without me.
I wake into a blue morning,
old snow slipping from branches,
rain falling like points of light.

Food for thought...deeper thought...

2012-01-18T19:25:00.000-08:00

Today I finished reading The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. In this very well-written treatise about not only the Internet but about how our brains work (in particular how memory works), Nicholas Carr persuasively argues for more time off-line. He puts to rest a number of current myths, for instance the idea that only young people are "natives" in Internet culture. The brain's plasticity seems an encouraging thing (so if constant distractions create a short attention span, then deliberate attention can repair this tendency?), but I wonder if my habit of writing in longhand in a notebook each morning is going to seem increasingly antiquated to my students. I worry about the future of reading novels, and of writing them.

But I also went sledding today with my daughters and one of their friends, which is one effective way to get all of us away from our electronic devices, not to mention the television.

http://www.theshallowsbook.com/nicholascarr/Nicholas_Carrs_The_Shallows.html

True Colors

2012-01-17T08:35:00.000-08:00

http://www.amazon.com/Horses-Never-Lie-about-Love/dp/1451605846/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1326817660&sr=8-1

A memoir by local poet Jana Harris, Horses Never Lie about Love, crossed my radar a couple weeks ago. This morning, wishing I had bought it then, I decided to take a look at it at Amazon.com and found a video about her remarkable mare, True Colors, that is MUST SEE.

Would my husband let me buy a horse farm?

Trying to imagine what's next...?

2012-01-16T16:42:00.000-08:00

"The sun can dawn, but we don't see it if the drapes are closed." Marianne Williamson

Hunger

2012-01-14T12:20:00.000-08:00

"Do not fear your hungers. They are neither good nor bad. Use hunger as fuel. Use hunger as energy. Guide your hunger. Focus your hunger. Use your hunger for growth. If you do not consciously direct your hunger, your hunger will use you and those around you." -Laura Day

One More List

2012-01-12T13:38:00.000-08:00

I've been reading Julia Cameron's Vein of Gold as part of my morning warm up. Sometimes I do the exercises, but just as often I'm lazy about them. This morning, however, she asked me to list 100 things for which I am grateful, and -- because of yesterday's post about lists, not to mention my pep-talk to my students -- I felt that I had better give it a try.

Whenever I've written a list this ambitious (100 questions, 100 things I'd like to do), I seem to start with a blank, and then find myself really stuck at about 20: I'm grateful that I am 20 questions in on this list. And I think about quitting. Sometimes I do quit. But if I push on, I suddenly break into another level, that I guess I'd have to call specificity. I'm not simply grateful for my daughters...not simply grateful for whichever one I name first...but I'm grateful for her Woody Woodpecker laugh, for her enthusiasm for her friends, for her wild hair, for her skills as a baker, for how good she is with children.

I get to number 100, and I'm no where near finished. What a shift!

You should try it.

Where do your ideas come from?

2012-01-11T12:20:00.000-08:00

In my Creative Nonfiction class I have been encouraging students to write lists.

12 trips -- the 7-11 late last night, or the Grand Canyon, or Brazil -- any 12 trips.
12 events -- curriculum night at your daughter's school, your wedding, your uncle's funeral.
30 chapters -- number 1-30 down the left hand margin of a page; beside #1 write, I AM BORN, now write the titles for the other 29 chapters of your life.
10 things you did yesterday -- write this in ALL CAPS and see what happens (what does it feel like to write in all caps?).

Next step: choose one item from one list and freewrite about it, that is, write without stopping for 10 minutes. Do this again, and maybe again on other items from the list.

Next step: list 10 things that, if you were to choose one of these freewrites to continue, to turn into a story, you'd want to include.

Now, give yourself a reward. Good job!

William Zinsser

2012-01-09T14:52:00.000-08:00

After almost two years of weekly blogs at The American Scholar, William Zinsser has signed off. I want to share his recent blog on the cartoon strip, "Blondie," because how can writing be more elegant and simple than that?

http://theamericanscholar.org/blondie-and-dilbert-2/

Emma at 12 1/2...

2012-01-06T14:13:00.000-08:00

Given that my daughters started school on Tuesday, and my classes don't begin until Monday the 9th, I've booked a lot of lunch and coffee dates this week. Everyone I see wants to know how my girls are, and when I respond with the standard motherly groaning and eye-rolling (though they are actually fairly boring children), my friends always seem to think I mean the 18-year-olds. "Now, Emma. She's twelve, right?"

As one friend added, "Isn't she the good one?"

Listen up. Emma is twelve and a half. It seems as though it was only a month or so ago that I began congratulating myself on getting Annie and Pearl safely ushered through the rough waters of adolescence, when Emma began...acting different. She's always been strong-willed and loud, a natural enough function of being the youngest of three. But suddenly, she was pouty and sullen. She was yelling at me and at her dad. She was slamming doors and hiding in her room. We were fighting over the car radio.

So I had a talk with ... not Emma (what good would that do?), but with myself. Hey, self, I said. Hang on tight!

Why am I telling you this? I think that raising teenagers and being a writer are very similar. My mantra with the girls has always been, "Keep them busy, and keep an eye on them." Oh, and, "Catch them doing something right," comes in a close second. Come to think of it, "If they read, don't worry too much about the rest of it," has also been a useful expression. (My unacademic threesome are all readers, one voraciously so.)

And my writing mantras fit in perfectly: Keep writing. Pay attention. Lots of terrible writing isn't a problem, so long as you find a little bit worth keeping. Read.

Nelson Mandela

2012-01-04T11:56:00.000-08:00

My friend Carla emailed me with this quote. You've no doubt read it before. We should all copy it out and carry it with us.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” - Nelson Mandela (from his 1994 inaugural speech)

Cats, Photographs & Creativity

2012-01-03T14:29:00.000-08:00

I love uploading my photos from my camera and finding 112 pictures of the cats. I choose to see this as creative outpourings from my children. I'm grateful that it's a digital camera and not old-school film.

What was I thinking?

2011-12-30T15:51:00.000-08:00

After three days at my mom's house -- a doctor appointment, a visit from the MIA nephew and his family, hanging out and watching Monk reruns, eating too much candy...I'm home again. Oh, good, I thought. Finally, I'll get some writing done.

How is it that my kids are 18, 18, and 12, and I'm still telling myself that I can get a lot of writing done over school breaks? Shouldn't I have learned better by now?

This is the picture I should have sent out with my Christmas cards. My mother is standing between me and Pearlie.

Ray Bradbury

2011-12-28T08:54:00.000-08:00

(image from Lee Valley Tools)

I found these lines set as the epigraph to Louise DeSalvo's book, Writing as a Way of Healing:

So while our art cannot, as we wish it would, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all....

Writing is survival....

Not to write, for many of us, is to die.

I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow. An hour's writing is tonic. I'm on my feet, running in circles, and yelling for a clean pair of spats.

Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

The American Scholar

2011-12-26T09:51:00.000-08:00

I have been meaning to add Priscilla Long's blog, "Science Frictions," from The American Scholar to my bloglist. It's a true delight: http://theamericanscholar.org/daily-scholar/science-friction/

Losing One's Way

2011-12-24T10:28:00.000-08:00

I was wandering around a bookstore and found this while lost in Tomas Transtromer's the great enigma: new collected poems; it's the opening sentence of his prose poem, "The Clearing."

"Deep in the forest there's an unexpected clearing that can be reached only by someone who has lost his way."

Be lost. Keep your eyes open.

Writing Toward Home

2011-12-22T10:36:00.000-08:00

This morning in my journal writing -- and in an email to a friend -- I have indulged in a pity-party. Why write? What's the use? Will any of this work, this writing, ever be to any point? Will my poetry book and my novels ever find publishers? Does anyone believe in me, besides me? Do I still believe? Everyone who has ever discouraged me loomed up in my imagination and stood there (a mob of them) frowning sternly: "You're wasting your time!"

Then, at the library, I came across this encouraging little book by Georgia Heard, Writing Toward Home: Tales and Lessons to Find Your Way (Heinemann, 1995). Here's the opening paragraph of an exercise:

"In order to write, you must face your inner critics, steal their power. Begin by trying to identify them. The more ambiguous they are, the more power they have. Write down: Who are they? What do they look like? Where do they work? At a university? At a magazine? How did they acquire so much power? When did they enter your life? In second grade, when your teacher threw your writing in the trash? In college, when your professor wrote huge X's all over the poems he didn't like? Last week, when you received four rejections in the mail? Describe them and what they're saying to you."

Ultimately, to be an artist in this world -- where money and technology and politics compete to rule our lives -- you have to find one person to believe in and 100% support your peculiar vision. And that person is you.

September, Fallen

2011-12-20T11:23:00.000-08:00

We sort through pictures all afternoon,

breathing the dust of chipped
and tattered corners. My young parents
sitting on the grass with their first two babies,
me and my brother,

gray light flooding around us.

Before dinner, I step out the back door

to gather a few scabby pears.

Under the skin, the fruit

will be unblemished and sweet.

Such a jolt--not a metaphor,

an electric tingle of awareness

like a bee's sting--

to brush our fingers over the faces
of so many loved dead. Near the backyard gate

a deer has left its hoofprint

mashed into one over-ripe pear.

Revising Oneself

2011-12-14T11:12:00.000-08:00

Grades are in and I've begun work on two manuscript revisions -- the poetry (always and forever, it seems) and one more round on PEARL'S ALCHEMY (I'm reading through the whole thing while waiting on my agent for comments). Of course, sometimes it's good right away, and here's a poem that -- at least in memory -- came through pretty clearly the first time. "Then" has been published twice, once by CROSSCURRENTS, and once in the anthology from Yarroway Mountain Press, A CADENCE OF HOOVES.

"It is no sign of weakness or defeat that your manuscript ends up in need of major surgery. This is common in all writing and among the best of writers." E.B. White

Then

When she was a girl and he was her horse,
she would lie on the grass at his feet (which she

would have been careful to call his hooves)
summer days, and he would take up the grass

in his teeth, his great yellow, beastly teeth,
even the grass mingled with her hair,

teasing her as if he would bite her hair,
though he never did. Standing at the barn door,

he would rub his long nose down her back.
Once, after a yawn (listening to her with her silly friends),

he closed his jaws around her arm
and shook it, mildly impatient as a husband.

And if you had asked her then, What is love?
she could so easily have told you.

*

And now that grades are in, I will also be 1) going to the gym, and 2) taking long naps.

A Writer's Space

2011-12-13T10:54:00.000-08:00

"It is a bad trick of the mind to announce to yourself that you can only write in a certain place, in certain circumstances, in a certain kind of weather, at a certain time of the day, after having a certain kind of meal, with a certain sort of pen. It is fine to have preferences but important to commit to writing anywhere. That way you can grab ideas when you're away from home; you can take a little writing trip when you feel dull at your desk; you can choose among your excellent haunts and decide which feels most congenial at the moment. By all means maintain a primary writing place; then add altenates." -Eric Maisel, A Writer's Space

Cortland Review

2011-12-12T10:04:00.000-08:00

Here's a video of poet C.K. Williams, courtesy of the folks at Cortland Review.

http://cortlandreview.com/features/11/winter/index.html?ref=nl1211

I'm supposed to be grading papers...

2011-12-07T16:44:00.000-08:00

...and I have been, but I also picked up this book via Interlibrary Loan, Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives, by Louise DeSalvo. She writes,

"What, though, if writing weren't such a luxury? What if writing were a simple, significant, yet necessary way to achieve spiritual, emotional, and psychic wholeness? To synthesize thought and feeling, to understand how feeling relates to events in our lives and vice versa? What if writing were as important and as basic a human function and as signifcant to maintaining and promoting our psychic and physical wellness as, say, exercise, healthful food, pure water, clean air, rest and repose, and some soul-satisfying practice?" (6)

The Trickster Strikes

2011-12-03T13:03:00.000-08:00

I don't know that I'm supposed to tell the world that my spirit guide -- in recent travels, anyway -- has been Coyote. If you know my poetry book (The Coyotes and My Mom) then you'll understand with what alarm, and wariness, and maybe even horror, I encountered her. (It was definitely a female coyote -- I don't know how that alters its trickster qualities. Not much, I would guess, but I can feel a difference in the energy.)

Anyway, yesterday I suffered a major setback in my writing gameplan. I reeled. Two students immediately showed up at my office door (my soccer girls, which kind of fits with this whole trickster theme) and I was so incoherent they must have wondered what was going on with me. But after a couple hours, after an evening with my friend Margaret listening to poet David Whyte (something of a trickster himself), I felt better. It could be a good thing, this huge shift in my gameplan. Don't I tell my students that when they find themselves within the unexpected, relish it?

Then, after dropping Margaret off at 10:30 p.m., I decided to drive home via Olympic View Drive, and there, standing in the middle of a bend as if waiting for me, was an exceedingly scruffy looking coyote. She stood stock still (why not a female?) and waited until my lights swept over her, then she trotted amicably away into the brush along the road.

It all adds up.

A long time ago I made two resolutions: 1) To let everything that happens draw me closer to God (this has been harder than I expected, but I keep trying), and 2) To use everything that happens as an excuse to write. Why not?

The End of Fall Quarter

2011-12-02T12:36:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I shared this quote from Julia Cameron with my Creative Nonfiction students:

There is a persistent notion that we must "wait for the muse to strike," as though creativity were so mysterious and capricious that we can, at best, hope to snare it as we would a rare butterfly.

The reality is just the reverse. We are the ones who show up. We are the ones who disappear for long periods of time. Creative energy is a constant and we can always tap into it.

(from her book, Vein of Gold, page 141)

Staying on the Path

2011-12-01T11:19:00.000-08:00

"Art is not just ornamental, an enhancement of life, but a path in itself, a way out of the predictable and conventional, a map to self-discovery." Gabrielle Roth

What Saves Us

2011-11-30T15:46:00.000-08:00

Today--right now--I am going to shut down my computer, push back my chair, walk out of this office, and mail my poetry manuscript. I can't fathom why sending out a manuscript should be so dang hard. I want to address it--as someone suggests in one of the books on my capacious shelves--"To the Editor Who Will Appreciate Me." Instead it has to go to an actual, physical location. It's a rich process. I don't think I'm finished with this manuscript yet. But sending it out (and ushering it to this threshold) seems a step in the right direction. Go little book.

“Your soul knows the geography of your destiny. Your soul alone has the map of your future, therefore you can trust this indirect, oblique side of yourself. If you do, it will take you where you need to go, but more important it will teach you a kindness of rhythm in your journey.” ― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Progress on the Must-Do List

2011-11-28T17:38:00.000-08:00

I've now reached the point where two items on my list MUST be resolved. The church newsletter deadline is tomorrow morning -- and two minutes ago I emailed the bio as an attachment. Check that off my list.

If I want to submit a poetry manuscript in time for the November 30 deadline, it has to go out in the next 48 hours. So, tomorrow or Wednesday? Why not?

The great thing is that once the poetry mss. is in the mail, the historylink.org article will be my ONLY must-do item left on the list. Oh, wait, I have the letters (but now those are feeling more doable). And, yes, end of the quarter student papers will be arriving soon. Yes, I have a couple other must-do items that can be added. But I'm going to count it all as progress. There are always the must-do's. One still has to proceed with the real, important work. The strange thing is that, with daily attention, the article for historylink has begun to feel like real and important work. Hmm, that's worth noticing.

I am compelled to add that poetry always feels real and important to me (and I don't need rewards to get myself to work on it). But I've been hanging fire on getting a mss. submitted for some months now. That's the piece that feels like busywork, the piece that requires some prodding to achieve.

"I don't need more time. I need a deadline." -Duke Ellington

Thanksgiving (update day 9ish)

2011-11-25T10:05:00.000-08:00

"Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts." -Salman Rushdie

Despite being at the farm visiting Mom over the last few days, I've managed to get in my 15 minutes of writing (about a half hour, in fact, each day) on the article. I'm reading and taking notes...blundering around still. But it occurred to me this morning that two weeks ago I was still fantasizing about "giving back" this assignment, and now I can see my way to the finish.

I'm thankful for a wonderful family. I'm thankful to find a little time to write.

"Caught in the Crosswalk" (update, day 8)

2011-11-23T13:05:00.000-08:00

Yes, I do get my gold star today. (It was a blue star, in truth.)

Here is the illustrious subject of my historylink.org article, professor, poet, storyteller Colleen J. McElroy, reading for Cave Canem:

http://www.sampsoniaway.org/blog/2011/07/21/poems-from-cave-canem-colleen-j-mcelroy-caught-in-the-crosswalk/

Writing Today (update day 7)

2011-11-22T14:44:00.000-08:00

I write every day. I write in longhand, in a journal, first thing every morning. But right now I'm also trying to write on my historylink.org article every day, for at least fifteen minutes.

We have a reading series at the college and when our famous writers (and not-so-famous writers) visit, a question I always ask is, "When do you write?"

Sometimes they don't write every day. "Not at all?" I ask (aghast).

"I need big blocks of time," they tell me. "I'm really busy," they tell me. "I'm too busy to write." Sometimes these writers are successful writers, visiting my college because they have new books and lovely writing awards. "The writing will wait," a short story writer told me last year. She was young and had a two-year old. But there was a time in my life when I had two two-year olds, and I still wrote every day. I can easily imagine myself saying, "I know just what you mean. I can't possibly write every day. I have two eighteen-year olds and a twelve-year old. I have a teaching career and a one-hour commute, and..." I understood exactly what this young writer was saying. To use the overused cliche, my heart went out to her. But I wanted to add, "Honey, you should write every day."

We have no time except today.

Here's a quote about daily writing from Priscilla Long's The Writer's Portable Mentor:

"Writing every day is the key to becoming a writer. Writing every day is the key to remaining a writer. It is the only secret, the only trick. Don't despise the fifteen-minute write. Don't despise writing in your journal. Don't despise writing down your complaints for fifteen minutes before going to work. Any writing counts." (13)

Long also advises that although some days will allow for longer writing sessions, what you do one day can't be applied to the next. If you write for two hours on Monday, you still have to get up on Tuesday and write ... for at least fifteen minutes.

And that is why, even though I worked on my article for an hour today during Writing Lab, I still don't get a gold star for yesterday.

Update (day 6)

2011-11-21T12:20:00.000-08:00

Yes, I did manage to work yesterday, though I didn't make it on-line to post about it. Early in the morning I worked for an hour (again) on the poetry manuscript (which I think I had better let go of soon).

I meant to get to the article early in the day, but instead I did laundry, balanced my checkbook, and graded papers. About 7:00, after dinner (and kids out of the house), I sat down in my green chair, determined to work for at least fifteen minutes. Then the phone rang. At 8:00, even though the kids had come home by that time, I worked for 20 minutes. Believe it or not, I had a breakthrough and I think I have my first actual paragraph now.

I made a calendar and got out my foil stars and gave myself a star for every day I've worked at least 15 minutes.

Update (day 4)

2011-11-19T20:43:00.000-08:00

It's 8:30, and my girls and I are settling down to watch Grimm, streaming this week's episode, which we couldn't watch last night, for various reasons.

I had a so-so day on my goals, which isn't bad considering that it's Saturday. I got up at 5:50 and, after doing the scribbling that I do every morning in my journal, I worked on the poetry manuscript for over an hour. The day commenced at 8:00 (a ringing phone)...and continued nonstop until 6 p.m., when Annie asked if I'd go to Barnes & Noble with her and do homework. Yes!

Once we had our lattes and hot chocolates, I took out my historylink.org notes and started working.

Annie was stumbling around, not starting her research paper about serial killers, and she asked me why I had written the time down at the top of my notebook page. "It's what I do, especially when I'm procrastinating on a project. I make a deal with myself to work for 15 minutes. And even though I'm the queen of procrastination, I usually end up working for a little more than 15 minutes."

Annie's eyes widened. "I'm the queen of procrastination," she said.

"So work for 15 minutes."

"And then I can take a break?"

Twenty minutes later she was reading a People magazine (hottest male stars issue), and I was reading short stories by Daniel Woodrell. (So much for working at a bookstore coffee shop.) But I had a time-line for my article, and Annie had two paragraphs written for her paper.

Did I mention that Emma was with us? She found the newest Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and by 8:00 had read 113 pages. I had to buy her the book so we could go home.

Update (day 3)

2011-11-18T09:40:00.000-08:00

I was so blessed to get to sneak out on my family last night and have dinner with a friend. We sat in her cozy living room and we ate Indian food, and we talked -- for about 3 hours. (Apparently I had a lot to say. And so did she.) Her cat Zimmie sat on my lap and purred loudly.

My friend said she'd visited my blog and it looked like things are really flowing for me right now. "You're getting so much done!"

No, I'm not. I'm grinding away here, gears screaming, hoping that the muse will show up at some point (because we know that just like eating encourages appetite, writing encourages inspiration, right?) and HELP ME!!!

Yesterday I had a presentation at school that -- even though I knew that it was no big deal -- was in front of the Dean's Council and (idiot for authority figures that I am) I completely overprepared for. (Not that it helped, though I think we will be approved for our learning community -- Writing Monsters -- next winter quarter.) But when I went back to my desk, I hauled out the poetry manuscript, opened the file on the computer, and started typing in changes and cutting out poems that don't fit as well as they could. It's down to 71 pages now (including the title pages). Doable. Today I'll drop by Kinko's and print it out. Maybe I'll actually put it in the mail?

Today I will work on my article for historylink.org (at least for fifteen minutes). Which reminds me, if you haven't visited Priscilla Long's blog at http://theamericanscholar.org/what-do-worms-want/, you really should.

Update (day 2)

2011-11-17T11:39:00.000-08:00

"One of the most profound traits that distinguishes us from other animals is our ability to imagine things that do not yet exist; our ability to envision future possibilities and to choose among them; in short, our ability to create." Laura Day

Yesterday I decided to follow my own 15-minute rule, but apply it strictly to the historylink.org article. I didn't make visible progress, but I did sit in a stare-down with the muse for more than 15 minutes. In fact, for more like an hour I stuck with the article, downloaded more information, reread, thought, did some gear-grinding. It's all good.

Awake early this morning, I hauled out my poetry manuscript and went all the way through it.

Update (1)

2011-11-16T13:04:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I checked "student papers" off my list. (Hurrah!) Yes, I do have another set waiting, but they are not long, creative projects, just book reviews, and I can do them quickly (and without writing letters back).

Yesterday I went to Writing Lab (this is a write-time lab for faculty and staff at my college; I direct it) and found only one person waiting for me. We talked for 20 minutes, then decided to go back to our student papers. A gift, of a sort, but it didn't help me make progress on my historylink.org article, which I have been pecking away at each week for the hour of Writing Lab.

I had a meeting at 3:30, then, at 5:00, my daughter Annie called to see if I would meet her at the Mukilteo Library to do homework. During that hour, I typed a very bad draft of the article. This was big -- as, until now, it's been confined to scribblings in a notebook.

I just now pulled it off my flash drive and printed it. Now to work on it some more.

I'll let you know tomorrow how I did.

2011-11-15T10:16:00.000-08:00

If you bumped into me in the last few days and wondered why I looked so overwhelmed and harassed, here are a few of the writing jobs on my MUST DO list:

Write letters and send a poem to the women from my fall Writing & Spirituality class.
Write the article for historylink.org (I've been procrastinating on this for 2 years now!)
Write the bio on JH for my church Progress (a monthly newsletter; I was asked to do this in April!)
Finish my student papers (this means writing a letter to each student after reading and rereading and digesting what they've written in their longer Creative Nonfiction paper. I still have four to go that should have been handed back yesterday...when they turned in a new set of papers.)
Meet the November deadlines with my poetry manuscript WHAT SAVES US (because my poetry mss. can't win a contest and get published if it's not "out" somewhere).

When I get these things done I will be able to go back to work on a novel. (Either HEARTWOOD, or THE SORREL MARE, or maybe the waitress novella...one of these is going to be in the mail to my agent by the end of the year.)

I want to work on the novel right now. But I'm trying to trick myself into doing this other work first, and posting about them here is part of that process. (I'll report in every day with a progress report.)

Watch this space!

Quoting Jane Yolen

2011-11-14T16:41:00.000-08:00

I've been reading Jane Yolen's Touch Magic: "The magical story is not a microscope but a mirror, not a drop of water but a well. It is not simply one thing or two, but a multitude. It is at once lucid and opaque, it accepts both dark and light, speaks to youth and old age." (32)

Where I Write

2011-11-08T16:00:00.000-08:00

I just had a lovely talk with a young writer named Olivia who wanted to know where I write. I told her about my green chair in the corner of the living room. I told her about carrying my notebook and pen with me everywhere I go with my kids. And then I felt a little guilty about that, so I told her about writing a poem about reading Graham Greene while at Wild Waves, about writing in my car between the time I drop my kids off and when I pick them up.

At one point in the conversation, as Olivia was trying to tell me about a book she is reading, she scooped up her purse, unzipped it, and produced the book. "This is why I have a big purse," she said. "Exactly!" I said.

It isn't so much a place, as it is an attitude.

If you have a passion, you can't have it part time or when it's convenient or when you're not busy with other things. If you have a passion, it's always your passion, even when you're doing other things. "What do you write about?" Olivia asked me, and I told her about the farm where I grew up, about my kids, about my students -- but now that I think about it, it's more complicated than that. This quote came to mind:

"Meaning is not in things but in between; in the iridescence, the interplay; in the interconnections; at the intersections, at the crossroads. Meaning is transitional as it is transitory; in the puns or bridges, the correspondence." -Norman O. Brown

I'm afraid I made it sound as though I get a lot of writing done, when it's really more like I do a lot of scribbling. Maybe I get slightly more writing done than other mothers-of-three, other college teachers. But I rather like the idea that I'm always writing about the "in between," and that maybe I'm writing even when I'm not writing -- about the paradoxes and intersections between being a mom and a wife and a teacher and a recovering farm-girl and a former waitress and voracious reader and a writer. Maybe the in between is all that any of us are ever writing about.

Why Write?

2011-11-03T13:16:00.000-07:00

One reason to write is because it gives your life meaning. Another reason is to create meaning.

/http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/31/an-interview-with-a-c-grayling/

Here's a short video of philosopher A. C. Grayling, which I found on the NYTimes website.

Hallelujah!

2011-11-02T13:02:00.000-07:00

You know those forwarded emails that you just hate to even open? Well, my friend Liz sent this, and -- what a delight!

***
Done like you've never seen before. This video from the small Yupiq Eskimo Village of Quinhagak, Alaska, was a school computer project intended for the other Yupiq villages in the area. Much to the villagers' shock, over a half million people have viewed it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=LyviyF-N23A

***
I hope you can find the time to view it.

What I'm Reading

2011-10-31T14:51:00.000-07:00

The other day a malfunction in the elevators and some nasty smoke resulted in the evacuation of my building at Everett Community College. Under a barrage of blaring alarms, I walked out of my office without grabbing my bookbag. Fortunately, I picked up my coat.

A lot of us stood around and talked just outside Gray Wolf Hall, shivering, thinking we would be allowed to re-enter in only a few minutes. But, no such luck. Finally, I went to the mailroom. I walked through the Parks building, where food services is housed, and thought about asking for a latte on credit, then wandered down to the library. In the library, I don't need I.D. They know me. I picked up two books: one titled How To Haiku (no doubt you will hear more about that later); the other, Jay Parini's Why Poetry Matters."Why poetry matters? Preaching to the choir, Mr. Parini?" I discovered that it is full of gems. Here's the epigraph to the preface:

"Life is energy, and energy is creativity. And even when individuals pass on, the energy is retained in the work of art, locked in it and awaiting release if only someone will take the time and the care to unlock it." -Marianne Moore

http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300124231

(40 of 40) The Last Blogpost?

2011-10-28T13:05:00.000-07:00

Well, the last blogpost in this series of 40. I promised 40 days of blogging...no guarantee that they would arrive 40 days in a row, but I wanted to land close to that mark.

Here's some of what I've learned, both about writing, and because I was writing (i.e., paying more attention than usual):

If I'm paying attention, life offers me something every day that makes a good analogy or lesson or example for a blogpost on writing.
It isn't my stuff that gets in the way of my writing, it's my belief that my stuff gets in the way.
I can sit down at my computer and write a blogpost in about 15 minutes...give or take a few minutes while I check for errors and straighten out any tangles.
Writing a blogpost every day is writing every day.
If I skip a day or write something lame now and then, none of my followers gets bent out of shape (at least, they don't tell me if they get bent out of shape).
My classes can be a rich source of more ideas for my own writing -- if I approach them in that spirit.
If I'm writing for accolades -- for fame and fortune -- then I'll quit writing. On the other hand, if I really want to do something, then that desire can be motivation enough.
When I'm dreading writing something, dreading my classes, dreading an interaction with a colleague or a wound-up daughter, that's fear. Recognizing that dread = fear is the first step to disabling it, and maybe even turning it into love. I have to credit my friend Carolynne and ACIM for this insight, but blogging helped me notice it.

Thanks for following along! And here's a link to the announcement about my prize-winning poem (and the poem, if you scroll down) at CALYX: http://www.calyxpress.org/Cranstonprize.html. There's a very cool link to a web page of one of the finalist's, and I hope you'll take a look at it.

Bethany

(39 of 40) The Writing Career

2011-10-27T12:20:00.000-07:00

Tuesday evening my daughter Annie dragged me and her sisters down to Secret Garden Bookstore in Ballard (http://www.secretgardenbooks.com/) to hear her favorite author, Tamora Pierce. (For her personal bio, click here: http://tamorapierce.com/bio.html.)
My friend Valorie sent Annie and Pearl two Tamora Pierce novels (Alanna, the First Adventure was, I think, one of them) when they turned twelve. I read one outloud, and then Annie took them over. I didn't read fast enough. She has since collected -- and read multiple times -- every one of Pierce's novels. Mastiff was released only on Tuesday, and, yes, we bought that one, too.

I wish I had Pierce's author-talk on a tape recorder. She didn't read aloud as authors often do on such occasions. She talked -- extemporaneously and in response to questions -- for over an hour. The bookstore was packed (we were standing between shelves to the side), and no one wandered away. In fact, a few people stumbled into the store to buy books and, mesmerized, stayed to listen.

The woman is a writing machine, with 27 books to her credit. She reads widely -- true crime and FBI reports are favorites -- and she never flinches from research. She waxed poetical about big dictionaries of medieval slang. Apropros to my recent posts, Does she revise? Yes. "Writers revise," she said, or scolded, adding, "and the writers who say they don't revise, are the ones who especially should."

(38 of 40) What We Hold Sacred

2011-10-26T16:32:00.000-07:00

I started my 40 days of blogging as a gift to my students (and Margaret, too) in the Writing and Spirituality class. Right now I'm trying to write a wrap-up email to them, and really stalling on it. Too busy? Uninspired? Then I found this passage in my morning's reading:

"...excellence in writing isn't only about voice and style. It is also about finding the truest parts of ourselves and having the moral strength never to waver from what we hold sacred." (Jill Jepson)

It's hard to write the wrap-up email because I hate to wrap up this class. I want to keep it.
It's hard to write the wrap-up email because I worry that I haven't done enough yet. I want to do more.
It's hard to write the wrap-up email because I'm not good at transitions. It's all part of my larger "stuckness" that this class addressed and that I'm still addressing.
I'm pretty sure that I learned more from them than they learned from me
It's hard to write the wrap-up email because it makes me too sad.

On the other hand, I wonder if I could take my own advice and focus on the positive aspects of each item on this list:

I don't have to wrap-up the friendships I formed in this class. I can keep them.
I have done enough for now.
I move through transitions -- acknowleged and unacknowledged -- all the time. I've certainly practiced them long enough to be great at them.
It's such a cool thing that I learned so much!
Thinking about this class makes me really happy. I hope Margaret and I can teach it again.

This feels like a first draft, doesn't it?

(37 of 40) What's Your Process?

2011-10-25T11:52:00.000-07:00

"Beginning writers have too much respect for their written drafts. They have been taught to respect--or fear, or stand in awe of, or to admire without question--the printed text. The writing, especially if it is typed, appears finished." -Donald Murray, The Craft of Revision, 200

I don't know if I agree with Murray about students and written drafts. Sometimes students seem to revere their handwriting so much they can't bear to change a word. Getting a piece typed and double-spaced can, in that event, give them the necessary distance to revise.

I have some counter-intuitive advice for you. Figure out what your hang-ups are, and then go there. If you believe you can't write in longhand, in a notebook, you should give it a try. Do it in the same spirit as you might use if asked to brush your teeth with your off-hand -- just to see what it does to your synapses. Do it several days in a row and see what happens.

For many years I felt that I had to write everything out in a notebook, preferably in a cafeteria or a coffee shop, someplace with noise. I wrote in a notebook, and then I used a typewriter -- a typewriter! -- to work through several drafts. Only then did I move to a word processor.

Then I had to write a doctoral dissertation. I didn't have time to fuss around. I had 18-month-old twins; I had a teaching appointment at the University of Washington. I got up early in the morning, when the house was deathly quiet. I made coffee, I put a load of laundry in the washing machine, and then I sat down (behind the couch, in our living room) at my computer, turned it on, opened the file for my dissertation, and started typing. Well, rereading and typing. (The first pages, and the first chapter, then chapters, got lots of attention. Eventually, I had to let go of even this method and move deeper into the project. It was terrifying.) After a couple of hours, I printed out whatever I had gotten through that day, and when I marched off to the university to teach, I packed those pages along with me. When I had a chance (between classes, students papers, meetings, etc.) I tugged the pages out of my bag, reread them, and made more notes. Did I mention that I had 18-month-old twins when this process began? At 11:30, I met my husband and said twins at the park-and-ride. I took the stationwagon, and the girls, and he went to work.

It took about two years of inconsistent, spotty attention, groaning and moaning, and talking it through, and then it took six months of dedicated, daily attention (about four months off from teaching), and I had a 250 page book to turn in to my doctoral committee. I could tell you more stories.

I could tell you lots more stories. The point, however, is that I gave up my laborious habits of having the right notebook and pen. I just wrote. And it worked.

(36 of 40) Rewriting

2011-10-24T12:46:00.000-07:00

"The first thing that has to be broken down is your relationship to authority. Your insecurity could possibly be the wedge that opens up your perspective on what you think it is possible for you to do." -Ross Bleckner

I love to revise. Writing a first draft (I mean, of a short story or the article I'm supposed to be writing for http://www.historylink.org/) can feel hideous, horrendous, hateful -- like pulling one's own teeth with a pair of pliers -- like the sound a dentist drill makes. Okay, so it doesn't feel that bad all the time. But sometimes.

Revising, on the other hand, because it doesn't begin with the blank page, is more like a playground. While I revise, I often find myself writing new pages, too, or at least lines and short paragraphs that fit into the original with asterisks and arrows directing the flow. I start with My mother reads mystery novels, only mystery novels. But by the third or fourth go-round, the line reads, The bookshelf in my mother's bedroom overflows with mysteries by Agatha Christie, J.A. Jance, Lilian Jackson Braun, Mary Higgins Clark, and Mary Daheim, but when I ask her what she's reading, she smiles vaguely. It's a mystery, I think, and then I say it aloud. "Of course," she says.

I don't know why my students -- usually -- don't like to revise. Maybe they think revising is going through and fixing errors. Putting the commas in the right places. Adding stronger verbs. But revising, etymologically, means "re-seeing." And re-seeing is what makes it feel like play to me. I read my own work, pen in hand, and it's like finding possibilities. Oh, I should describe the bedroom! Oh, I can describe mom! Oh, I'll add the story about her high school teacher and Nancy Drew. At the top of the page I write in big letters: READ A NANCY DREW MYSTERY!!!! WHY DID MOM, EVEN AS A KID, LOVE MYSTERIES? WHAT DID THEY DO FOR HER? WHAT EMPTY PLACE DID THEY FILL? Suddenly I'm not writing an essay, I'm living a story -- I'm off on an adventure of discovery.

One of my students this morning said he writes better when it's just before the deadline. Another student said, "It's hard to quit procrastinating when you get an A for a paper written the night before it was due." I've gotten those A's, too. Even so, I can't write my mom-and-mystery novel story without first writing a draft that makes me aware of all I don't know.

I continue to think that almost any piece of writing can be better. As I often say to my students, The most exciting thing -- and the most frustrating thing -- about writing is that it can always be better.

(35 of 40) Places to Hide

2011-10-21T13:04:00.000-07:00

Here's another essay idea.

Where have you hidden? Imagine writing a piece (a poem, prose poem, or creative nonfiction) in which you list every place you can remember hiding during your life.

The places could be physical, and they could be emotional. Some of the items could include mini-scenes or quick descriptions of those you hid from. You might want to include a time someone hid from you. (I remember my youngest daughter hiding in the clothes rack at Mervyn's, causing the entire store to lock down while we searched for her.)

Number the parts, or just separate each one with an asterisk. See what happens.

(34 of 40) What Makes It Interesting?

2011-10-20T17:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday in my Creative Nonfiction class, several students admitted that they have not yet chosen a topic for what we call "the longer paper." This is a project I ask students to work on all quarter long, from day one! They do a 30-chapters exercise, we do character sketches in class, and we do some other brainstorming stuff (9 trips, 9 events). We look at the portkey essay (which I blogged about a couple weeks ago). And we look at the collage essay. I give them lots of examples to read on their own.

Apparently, this quarter, it's not working, at least for some of my students. "Nothing has ever happened to me," one of them complained. "Nothing interesting," another said.

They seemed pretty discouraged, and I picked up on it. Oh, life is so dull! I lost sleep over it.

But this morning, it all turned around for me. 1) It's mid-quarter, and we always have a little slump of enthusiasm at mid-quarter. 2) Of course their lives are exciting! Of course things have happened to them! 3) And it's not even a failure of imagination that they (and I) weren't seeing it yesterday, it's a failure of faith.

Here's my guarantee (and, no, I never was a cheerleader). If you will choose any topic -- your great aunt Mildred and her varicose veins, your best friend Joe who dropped out of school and works as a clerk at Build-a-Bear, the engine rebuild that you did with your dad -- and then pay attention to it, scratching your head, scratching your pen across the paper, tugging and pushing it just a little bit every day for a few days in a row, it will become interesting.

You still can't think of anything? Here's a little assignment: Make some notes about phone calls you've had that changed your life. Big change or little change, it doesn't matter. List them. Now circle three that jump out at you. Now set your timer (on your stove or on your phone) and write for five minutes about one...now for the other two. Include attention to these details: What phone did you receive this news on? What was the ring like? Where were you when you answered the phone? Who was on the other end? What did they say? What did you say? What happened then? What changed? Put these together under one title and see what happens. You can weave -- or braid -- them together or you can subtitle them 1, 2, 3. I'd love to see the results. (Wouldn't you?)

(33 of 40) Piano Practice

2011-10-19T15:04:00.000-07:00

When I was a girl, I took piano lessons. This was a financial hardship for my parents, but it was intended, I think, to prepare me to play hymns in church, and perhaps to make me good material to become a minister's wife. My teacher was my Uncle Billy, who was also a high school math teacher and, later, a principal. On Wednesday afternoons I rode the bus home with my cousins, a boy a few years older than I, and another, a few years younger. I spent an hour or two romping with them, or I helped my Aunt Evelyn in the kitchen, and badgered her with questions. She had a big kitchen garden, and a greenhouse. She was a very good cook and often kept me at her house until after dinner. Sometimes she cooked artichokes.

When Uncle Billy got home from work we sat down together in a corner of the living room. I sat on the piano bench; he pulled up a chair behind me. He sketched as he listened (I still have a picture he drew of "Mr. Bethany King"). When it was time to introduce the new lesson, he took a seat on the bench beside me, and I waited demurely, my hands folded on my lap, while he showed me what to do--how a real player could make those keys dance. Uncle Billy was a very good piano player. When I played, it never sounded like that. He told me stories, too, illustrative ones. I learned that when he was a boy he practiced the piano for an hour or two every day while his widowed mother sat sewing. I vowed to practice more.

But I never practiced more than I had to, and my mother finally saw that it wasn't going to take. "You just want to go because Evelyn spoils you," she said, and she made me quit taking lessons.

Daily writing is a little like piano practice. You don't have to write a new symphony--or a ragtime ditty--every day in order to become a better writer, in fact, you may be better served by letting your writing practice be a little closer to playing scales. Every Good Boy Does Fine. You'll be well served by doing some playful imitations. Play around with sentences. Write fragments and compound sentences and complex sentences and list sentences. Try describing settings and characters, quickly. Try throwing down a scene. Just write. Let it be dumb or "shitty" (as Anne Lamott says). Mind your teacher and write a little every day.

I never fell in love with the piano. And I never married a minister. I'm sorry about that (I mean the playing piano part), especially when I'm in a room with a piano and I get this itchy, uncomfortable feeling that someone is going to ask me to play. On the other hand, when I sit down to write I often recall that feeling of lifting my hands to the keys, the pause, and then the music flowing out. More to the credit of my uncle's gracious family than to my own prowess (or lack of it), it's a good memory.

(32 of 40) Who Gets to Write?

2011-10-18T16:14:00.000-07:00

http://www.mollyhashimoto.com/molly_hashimoto/

A really cool thing happened to me Saturday morning. I dropped by the library to check my on-line class and email, and, as I entered, I saw a flyer for a watercolor class taught by artist Molly Hashimoto (and sponsored by the Mukilteo branch of the Friends of the Library). I stopped in the lobby to read the flyer, and noticed people trickling into the meeting room. On the tables in the meeting room, I saw pieces of paper and cups of water and Prang watercolor sets. I checked the flyer to see the start time. Five minutes. Hmm, I thought. There it is again, watercolors.

(See my 9/30/11 and 10/4/11 posts for more about watercolors.)

I went into the library, found a computer station and logged on. I opened my email. I opened my on-line class. Then I thought, Bethany! Go take that class!

I stood up and walked to the room. I asked if there were spaces available and if I needed any supplies. There were spaces, and the supplies were provided.

I returned to the computer, logged out, grabbed my stuff, and joined the class. And not only did I get to play with watercolors for an hour and a half (the class was called something like "Using Watercolor to Create a Seasonal Journal"), but I noticed a number of correspondences between Hashimoto's teaching and my own.

1. At its most basic, writing is play.

2. Anyone can write.

3. Although some people are going to write all the time and become skilled, anyone can write and, with a little attention, be pretty happy with the result.

4. Writing doesn't require a lot of fancy equipment.
5. You can write outdoors.
6. Details make your work more personal.
7. If you let it, writing can teach you a lot about how to see the world.

(31 of 40) The Next Fifteen Minutes

2011-10-17T12:59:00.000-07:00

http://www.authormagazine.org/interviews/interview_page_kircher.htm

I'm a big fan of Author Magazine, and of its editor, William Kenower. This interview, focusing on Kim Kircher and her first book, a memoir titled The Next Fifteen Minutes, is 24 minutes long, but I want to recommend it in particular. In a nutshell, Kircher has written a memoir about how her work on Ski Patrol at Crystal Mountain prepared her for what she would face during her husband's battle with cancer.

The entire interview is wonderful, and includes lots of good advice about writing a memoir. The title, however, is what grabbed my attention. Every fifteen minutes her husband -- in his hospital bed -- can push a button that will result in the delivery of more painkiller. When his pain is at its worse, the goal becomes to get through the next fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes is relevant in Kircher's work on a ski mountain, too, as fifteen minutes (her example in the interview) is how quickly they need to transport an injured skier to the base lodge.

So, reaching all the way back to the beginning of my 40 days of blogging, and yesterday's post, and maybe my ski post from two days ago...writing may not be life-and-death, like liver cancer is, but it can feel impossible. But what if all you had to do was get through 15 minutes of writing?

You can do that.

(30 of 40) What You Nurture Will Grow

2011-10-16T21:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I took my girls and a friend's toddler to the pumpkin farm. Having the toddler with us was quite a treat, but I was also pleased to see how "little" my three big girls can still act. Everyone was delighted by the pumpkins, the farm animals (a very sweet black and white calf, chicks, rabbits, chickens, turkeys, not to mention the pigs).

It's late Sunday night after a busy weekend, and I'm perfectly happy to have spent almost every minute of the weekend with my kids. It isn't necessarily profound, and one needn't even be all that nurturing. But what we pay attention to does grow. Pay attention to anger, your resentment, your status as a beleagured victim of circumstances, or -- you can pay attention to what brings you joy, what makes you grateful -- and even if you are incredibly busy, a few minutes of thirsty attention to your writing over a few days will eventually show results.

(29 of 40) One more lesson from skiing...

2011-10-15T12:53:00.000-07:00

After writing the post yesterday, I remembered something else my skiing instructor (his name was Steve, and he was a middle-school English or History teacher. I had a major crush on him) once said to me.

He pointed down the slope at a clump of small evergreens and said, "I'm going to teach you something about teaching." (At this era in my life I was a waitress in Kelso, Washington.) "If you don't want your students to ski right into those trees, then don't say, 'Don't hit the trees,' or 'Watch out for the trees,' or even, 'Ski around the trees.' If you say 'trees,' they are doomed." Then he grinned in his devil-may-care way and said, "Okay, see you at the bottom."

I pushed off after him (clumsily, I was new at this), thinking, "Don't hit the trees. Don't hit the trees." You can guess how that turned out.

The same thing works in writing -- and in life. Don't say "I would write more if I weren't so lazy." "I could write early in the morning before work if only I didn't stay up so late at night drinking wine and watching TV."

Say (or write in your journal!) "I'm writing more." "I'm going to bed at 10:30 when my teenagers go to bed." Go to bed early. Get up early. Make time to write. Then you'll be telling the truth, and encouraging yourself to make a great run at your writing for the day...and, if you're like me, the next day and the next.

This is also why pointing out student errors in freshman composition doesn't make them better writers.

I'm sharing the only snow picture I could find, my mom's front yard a couple Christmases ago.

(28 of 40) The only way down is down...

2011-10-14T16:19:00.000-07:00

I have a friend who says, when faced with a problem, "The only way through is through." I have been spending time with her lately, and maybe that's why I woke up the other morning with this vivid image of myself standing at the top of a ski slope. I was on skis, looking down a steep, mogully slope, the words of my old ski instructor (a hottie, from my early 20s) echoing in my ears: "The only way down is down."

A ski slope is a different kind of problem than...well, a "problem." For one thing, everytime I've ever gone skiing I was choosing to be there, excited to be there, hopped up as if on drugs to be there. I love skiing. Even so, not being world class at the sport, I frequently found myself at the top of a slope that was a bit too challenging for my taste.

I could stand there at the top for a long time, squinching my skis and poles around, maybe doing a long traverse and quick crowhop turn then another long traverse across the slope. Finally, far behind my skiing buddies, I'd have to go for it. "The only way down is down," I'd mutter, and point my skis down the hill.

That's how I've been feeling about tackling a new writing project. I want to be here. I'm glad I'm here. I choose to be here. But I still find myself filled with dread, making those silly big wedgie turns (what are those called?) and hesitating.

It's time. And the only way to write the next thing is to write it.

(27 of 40) Writing a Scene, III: Deep Cuts

2011-10-13T11:04:00.000-07:00

How do they get out of the Garbage Chute?

This is my final observation concerning our scene from Star Wars. Filmmakers have only a certain number of minutes they can hold onto an audience. Writers, too, need to be aware of how much patience their readers may (or may not) have. What's essential? As someone has said, "Art is life with the boring bits left out."

This is why filmmakers, despite the $$ they've invested in every scene they shoot, leave a lot of footage on the cutting room floor. Just because you put some time and ink into writing it, doesn't mean it belongs in your final, edited story.

Think deeply about what your story is really about. Make deep cuts between the important, most relevant parts. We don't need to know that the character turned the doorknob (with his left hand!), opened the door, stepped out, walked down the hallway (looking over his shoulder to see if we're still following!). If one scene shows him wide awake at midnight and thinking of home, then the next shows him drinking coffee talking on the phone to his mother, we'll make that leap with you. It's morning!

Why Luke's hair is so tidy in the next scene is a different sort of question.

(26 of 40) Writing a Scene: II

2011-10-12T12:54:00.000-07:00

In almost every writing class I teach I eventually bring in Star Wars IV: A New Hope, and show the Garbage Chute scene. I know, it's a bit nerdy of me.

It's really two or three scenes interwoven -- Luke, Leia, Chewbacca, and Han Solo fighting off the stormtroopers in the cell bay; C3PO and R2D2 in the control room; and Luke and company in the trash compactor.

All scenes, like stories, have a beginning, middle, and end, but this scene really has a beginning, middle, and end, and it dramatizes other features of much longer stories. The characters have both external and internal desires. They undergo an abbreviated hero's journey a la Joseph Campbell (remember Luke disappearing under the water). There's a love triangle. Characters become more developed in this scene, both individually and in relationship. And the stakes, for all the characters, are high -- life and death.

High stakes make storytelling easy, and maybe this is why my Creative Nonfiction students write about childbirth, car crashes, drunken escapades in the middle of the night, and the death of grandparents. But what about the story you want to write about picking strawberries when you were ten, or taking your horse to the fair, or riding your bicycle all the way to the grocery store after you turned twelve? In order to write a big scene, is it necessary to have the walls collapse?

What's required to make a quiet story feel "big" is to step back and rethink it creatively, a little like taking a director's look at your own life. Who were the main characters? Were you the protagonist? Who was the antagonist? What did you want? What stood in your way? Who were you at the beginning of this quiet story, and who were you at its end? What did you learn? If not life itself, if not the galaxy, what was at stake?

Trust me, something was at stake. If you are awake, if you pay attention, then there's something to learn. As they write their stories, my students begin to see that, looked at in the right way, they are always learning, and the stakes are always high.

(25 of 40) Writing a Scene: I

2011-10-11T14:01:00.000-07:00

The students in my Creative Nonfiction class have to write and workshop a scene this week. My best advice for writing a scene is "Start Small." A scene can have one person in it, but it seems a little easier to write with two. A scene has to have something happen. A little dialogue can add spice. Yes, a scene can go on for ten or twenty pages, but it can also be ten lines long. Here's one of my favorite scene prompts:

"Of course I love you," ______ said.

Your job is to decide who to put in that blank (he is okay, or a character's name), and then to have something else happen. This character could continue talking. He could do something. Or a second character could respond.

This is an entertaining exercise to share with a small group.

(24 of 40) Listing

2011-10-10T12:24:00.000-07:00

I've been out of town, at my mother's house and at a teaching conference in Yakima, then back to Mom's to help celebrate her 79th birthday. Somehow the combination of locales and tasks (sorting through old photographs and greeting cards, talking about student writers) left me feeling melancholy. Too much in too short a time. I'm having trouble processing it.

So here's another exercise from Heather Sellers that works to fix a particular day's events in one's memory.

1. In ALL CAPITALS, list ten things that you did yesterday.
2. In ALL CAPITALS, freewrite for ten minutes on one item on the list.
3. If you're writing with someone else, you can now talk about how it felt to write in ALL CAPS. If you're writing alone, write a paragraph about how it felt.

Here's my list of ten things beginning Saturday afternoon.

1. DROVE OVER WHITE PASS
2. STOPPED TO TAKE A PICTURE OF MT. RAINIER
3. BOUGHT A LATTE AT A STAND WITH "BEAR" IN THE NAME (IN PACKWOOD????)

4. LISTENED TO DONNA LEON'S A GIRL OF HIS DREAMS ON CD
5. ARRIVED AT THE FARM AFTER THREE HOURS OF DRIVING TO FIND MY BROTHER THERE (!) AS WELL AS THE EXPECTED MULTITUDE
6. HEATED UP A PLATE OF FOOD IN THE MICROWAVE -- CORN ON THE COB
7. SANG HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MOM
8. ATE CHOCOLATE CAKE WITH CARAMEL ICE CREAM
9. PACKED MY GREAT NIECE OUTSIDE IN THE DARK TO PLAY GHOSTS IN THE GRAVEYARD WITH HER COUSINS
10. WATCHED TV WITH MY NEPHEW, HIS WIFE, AND MY THREE GIRLS

As I hadn't seen my brother since Dad's funeral, I'll have to write about what it was like to see him.

(23 of 40) Writing about What Bugs You

2011-10-06T10:53:00.000-07:00

During our class Monday night, I mentioned that when my twins were little I discovered that if I spent sometime writing about them -- not complaining about them, mind you -- I felt better. I still remember writing a list sentence (an imitation exercise) describing them. I'm at the library, so I don't have access to the original, but it went something like this:

My five-year old daughters--noisy, unruly, uncombed as wild ponies and as exuberant--rush into the kitchen, grab at my legs, grab at each other, roll on the floor giggling, jab and punch and wrestle.

My girls have grown up. At 18, they present me with a completely different set of challenges (and, having survived their preschool years, there's really nothing they do now that I'm not equal to). What bugs me now is my day-job, teaching at the college. So, instead of whining in my journal this morning, I thought, What if I were to write about my students? And then I did, not complaining, but describing, making a story out of it. I have this tickling sensation that I have embarked on an entirely new project.

The picture, by the way, is of Emma, not of her big sisters. Her jar with the bugs in it just seemed too perfect, given my title. (I believe we set the bugs free after we snapped the picture.)

(22 of 40) "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." G. K. Chesterton

2011-10-05T14:11:00.000-07:00

I'm compelled to share my first very bad watercolor.

I'm trying to remember the original context of G. K. Chesterton's (1874-1936) advice, "anything worth doing is worth doing badly." I believe he was explaining that while we want experts to perform certain tasks -- baking souffles for State dinners perhaps, or leading us on mountain climbing expeditions -- we want to do other things for ourselves. A man should blow his own nose, for instance, even if he doesn't do it with particular skill. We, generally, want to rear our own children, even though Mary Poppins would certainly do it better -- and, in most cases, our children prefer that we stick with this task until we have muddled our way through it. So, I admit that watercolors are much better off in the hands of Monet. And if I could hire someone to write my poems and stories, I guess I'd want Yeats or Dickinson.

On the other hand, drawing and dabbling the watercolors on my silly little picture pleased me, and I'm glad I did it. I think I'll do it again. (I may even take a class, as I'm sure I could do it somewhat less badly with a little encouragement.)

Isn't there a story or a poem or an essay in your head that only you -- no matter how badly -- can tell?

(21 of 40) Writing Anyway

2011-10-04T14:49:00.000-07:00

I just watched this video from Author Magazine:

http://www.authormagazine.org/interviews/interview_page_sheen.htm

and wish to recommend it to you. It features Lynn Sheene, whose first novel, The Last Time I Saw Paris (published by Berkley Books of New York), began with her fascination with an Art Deco brooch. In the interview with editor Bill Kenower, Sheene concludes: "Writing has taught me diligence because in order to do it you have to keep writing even when you don't feel like it, even when the story's not cooperating, even when the characters are not talking to you, even when you are sure that no one will ever want to read another word that you've written -- because not writing is actually worse."

That's a little how I'm feeling today. But now I'm going to take fifteen minutes and write anyway.

(20 out of 40) The Hello Kitty Band-Aid Poem

2011-10-03T15:56:00.000-07:00

Carson McCullers

Photo by Carl Van Vechten, 1959

It's only fair that I try to do my assignment from yesterday. Bear with me. I feel like doing something prosy.

The Hello Kitty Band-Aid Poem

"Do you think you'll ever amount to anything?" my dad used to say to me. I'd be sitting on the hearth beside his chair at some family gathering. He'd hold his hand out and I'd drop mine onto it, palm to palm. "No," I would say. "I won't ever amount to anything."

I have a Hello Kitty Band-Aid on my thumb. I was peeling potatoes and quarreling with my husband and then, blood everywhere.

Now I've been banished from the kitchen. Two of my daughters, impressed with the amount of blood my thumb produced, made a fuss over me. One brought a fresh paper towel. The other brought a Band-Aid. "It's Hello Kitty," she said. "That should make you feel better."

My husband takes a break from grating potatoes. "It's good it was your left hand," he says. "Do you want to take a painkiller?"

I do feel better. I pick up Carson McCullers' A Member of the Wedding and find my place.

Outside, it's raining.

My youngest daughter's soccer team won today and she did a perfect somersault when she collided with another player. It wasn't raining then.

During the game I took a picture of a big stump beside the soccer field. A huckleberry bush grew from its top. I thought about Dad, who could have told me what kind of tree the stump was from, and how long ago it had been cut.

The rain falls harder and my girls run outside to see. Their dad stands at the top of the stairs and yells after them, "Don't get wet."

Frankie, in A Member of the Wedding, has gotten too big to sleep with her father. "Who is this long-legged blunderbuss trying to climb into my bed?" I remember when my mother told me to quit sitting on Dad's lap.

I hold the novel in my lap and I'm so sad I can't read anymore.

In a dream, two nights ago, Dad showed up, looking great. I hugged him so hard. I told him I loved him and he said, "I know." We were standing in the woods, under huge evergreens, and yellow light sifted over us.

"Do you think you'll ever amount to anything?" he used to say to me. I'd be sitting on the hearth beside his chair and he'd hold his hand out and I'd drop mine onto it, palm to palm. My Hello Kitty Band-Aid would have made him frown and shake his head, all in jest. How is it that I knew how pleased he was with me?

"No, " I'd say, exaggerating my tone for effect. "I'll never amount to anything."

(19 of 40) More Getting off Balance

2011-10-02T20:07:00.000-07:00

I thought I should try to explain the title of my last post. Many writing exercises have a goal of knocking us out of our conscious, tightly controlled (well, somewhat controlled) mind and into our unconscious. My friend Shawna, for this reason, calls writing "a trip down the rabbit hole," you know, a la Alice in Wonderland.

Imitating another writer is one way I get myself (would that be my ego?) to shut up. I get so busy concentrating on doing the assignment right (I've always been a whore for A's), that I forget all about content and usually end up surprising myself.

Or you can try this. List 10 concrete nouns. List 2 or 3 colors. Name a place. Write down a phrase you overheard someone say today. Write down a single image from a recent dream. Now put these on index cards (equal size bits of paper), one item per card, and shuffle. Now, use these -- whatever order they turned out in -- to write a poem.

(18 of 40) Getting off Balance

2011-09-30T13:56:00.000-07:00

This week I've been trying to notice where I say "can't." I started out, Monday night, with my realization that when I try to imagine writing more (something I want very much to do), I USUALLY very quickly shut down. I CAN'T write more. My husband, kids, teaching job (you can fill in your own blank) DON'T let me. I CAN'T change this. What happened, to quickly reiterate, was I suddenly saw this as a belief and I began freewriting about how I MIGHT change things. And I came up with a whole list of ways to write more.

Another strange CAN'T emerged when I opened a present from my friend, the writer Priscilla Long. She wrote me a nice note ("Congratulations on finishing the novel rewrite! Hurrah!"), and sent me a blank-ish journal. But it wasn't a writing journal. It was an artist's sketchbook, with quotes (blank-ish, not blank) to inspire one to make pictures.

What is Priscilla thinking? Is she crazy? I can't start making pictures!

The next day, I finally made it over to the campus mailroom (first time this quarter), and discovered a package from Amazon.com -- stuff I'd ordered a month ago and forgotten about. In it was Natalie Goldberg's Living Color, a book that combines Natalie's paintings and drawings with a narrative about how her art evolved.

I should add that, among our Monday night students, half are visual artists. It seems the universe is trying to tell me something.

I don't know where this is going to lead me. But I can't say CAN'T, so I'm going to find out.

(17 of 40) Synchronicity

2011-09-29T15:41:00.000-07:00

"The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable." - Sun Tzu.

After writing the blogpost about my lack of a home office, and reading my friend Lori's comment (in essence, take another look around the house), I was bemoaning my STUFF to my friend Therese. People just can't understand how chaotic my life is. I won't have an office until these three kids grow up and leave home. Will they ever grow up and leave home?

The problem is this: when my kids grow up and leave home if I haven't dealt with my real, internal, Bethany-baggage, I still won't have the psychological room I want to write all I want to write. If I don't deal with that stuff, I'll without a doubt spend several years whining about how needy my adult children are, how they keep moving back home, and (of course) how much I miss them!

Therese came home with me. She had dinner and watched a movie with us (Star Trek, no doubt a forthcoming blogpost topic). The next morning, she got up and said, "Okay, let's tackle your office."

I said, "No! Let's wait until my Christmas break at least!" I said, "What about church this morning? What about Emma's soccer game? I just can't do it right now."

Therese said, "You're a writer. You have to have a home office. Let's do it now."

Two hours later we had thrown away a bunch of Bethany-baggage. We moved shelves and stuffed all my photographs and silly scrapbook supplies into boxes. We moved the big cabinet desk out to make more room (so the space won't be disrupted every time I set a piece of paper on the chair).

After Emma's soccer game I went to the office store and bought a new computer cord and a cool little strip to cover up where it crosses the carpet.

I have an office! Now what's stopping me?

(16 of 40) Curriculum Night

2011-09-28T16:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went to Curriculum Night at my youngest daughter's middle school. Her first period class is Spanish, and so for 12 minutes I sat at Emma's desk and listened to her very vivacious (and very young) Spanish teacher. On the white board directly in front of me was a poster explaining the two types of "to be" in Spanish: Estar, meaning how or where one is; and Ser, meaning who or what one is. Below the explanation, a cartoon-figure man was saying, "Coma estas?" and a cartoon-figure woman was saying, "Yo soy bellisimo." (How are you, and I'm beautiful.)

Aside from the verisimilitude of the couple's inability to communicate, the estar and ser really grabbed my attention. In my Creative Nonfiction class on Monday, we did a setting exercise and, afterward, I attempted to point out how setting reveals character. It matters whether your grandmother has a $25 garlic press, or a full wine rack, or an old-fashioned, stove-top coffee percolator. If you peek out your stepfather's kitchen window and see special solar light garden gnomes, well, that's one kind of stepfather. The one with a 1962 Ford pickup up on blocks -- that's a different kind.

But another thing I tried to convey to my youngish students is that the choices we make about our surroundings also reveal our characters. Maybe these choices aren't made at a conscious level, but you're still getting full credit from the universe for them.

Try freewriting around this topic. When you sit down in your bedroom, or kitchen, or _____, what do you see? If you're the main character in your own life, what are your "readers" picking up about you?

(15 of 40) My Big Insight

2011-09-27T22:16:00.000-07:00

During last night's class I think I experienced one of those major breakthroughs that we all work toward and hope for. Well, that creative people work toward and hope for.

I listed the things that stand in the way of my passion -- my writing -- and the list was the same as it always is. My husband and kids, my teaching job (whine, whine, whine, if they would only give me more space and time to write, if the universe would only let me be a full time writer). And then I got it.

It isn't my husband, kids, and students that get in my way, it's my BELIEF that they get in my way that gets in my way.

Am I making sense?

I felt as though someone or something had just rapped its knuckles on the kitchen window of my soul and said, "Hey!" They aren't obstacles. They're GIFTS.

And if I hadn't been sitting with a group of supportive writers, writing, I would never have gotten there.

(14 of 40) The Portkey Assignment

2011-09-26T15:54:00.000-07:00

If you are one of the stalwart few who have not read any of the Harry Potter books, or caught any of the movies, a Portkey is an object that is magically endowed so as to become a conduit for travel. All one has to do is touch this object (an old boot, a trophy) and he or she teleports -- I think that's the right word -- across space to wherever it leads.

In other words, a portkey is a symbol. I touch the marble bookend on my shelf -- the one shaped like a horse's head -- and I'm suddenly 18 years old, just graduating high school and opening a package from my cousin Mary...and then I'm fifteen and Mary and I are riding my bay horse as he splashes into Deer Creek on my dad's farm.

I pick up the green glass frog sitting beside my coffee cup and suddenly I'm sitting in a room with several other writers doing an exercise...and then it's May, 2009, and I'm sitting on the back deck at my parents' farmhouse and I can hear the cricking of a frog...and then I'm a newlywed and very small treefrogs start appearing in our house (the front door didn't have a strip at the bottom to keep them out, yet).

Okay, so that's my fifteen minutes. I could say more.

(13 of 40) I'm Gonna Write Myself a Letter

2011-09-25T16:25:00.000-07:00

Writing every day can be a little like hiring a life coach.

So here's your assignment for today: imagine your life in one year. Imagine it the way you would really like it to be. Idealize! Dream! Imagine it fully. What's great that your present tense self can look forward to? What changes does your present-tense self need to undergo to get ready for you? Is there anything you need to warn yourself about?

(12 of 40) Giving Thanks

2011-09-24T11:24:00.000-07:00

Imagine this: your book is finished. (Even if you don't have a book, imagine this.)

Now you have to write the ACKNOWLEDGMENTS page. Who will you thank?

Start writing now.

(image from http://www.rjoproduce.com/index.php?c=68)

(11 of 40) Learning from learning....

2011-09-23T15:58:00.000-07:00

In the last ten minutes -- yes, just now! -- I finished my novel rewrite and sent an e-copy to my agent.

Whew!

I'm on my way to Fedex-Kinko's to print out a copy to put in the mail.

I feel like a wrung-out sponge. In the last three months (four months?) I have learned so much about my own writing and writing process that I can hardly contain it all. I've learned about structure, about subplot and about useful objects (see Robert J. Ray's The Weekend Novelist Rewrites the Novel: a Step-by-Step Guide to Perfecting Your Work), and I've learned smaller but absolutely pervasive style tricks (Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself into Print [2nd edition], by Renni Browne and Dave King was one of the books I used), tricks I can't believe I didn't already know.

I've encountered this wisdom in other places -- lots of other places -- but now I can bear witness to you that it's true, true, true: if you trust your writing, if you keep going to it in faith, and faithfully, it will teach you what you need to know.

I'll have something meatier for you tomorrow.

(10 of 40) Imitation

2011-09-21T13:24:00.001-07:00

May I add William Faulkner to my steering committee? I'm sure the two of us would have a great conversation about steers -- and bulls -- and whether or not "a steering committee" is truly a good idea.

But to the subject of this post. I am a great believer in imitation. If you study the old, dead writers you discover that as part of their education they had to copy out works by the masters. Often they were copying Latin dialogues or treatises into English, but they were writing them out, putting Virgil or Homer or Socrates into their own hand. Artists still do this, spending a considerable portion of their apprenticeship on copying. I don't know why the practice has fallen out of fashion for writers.

So here's a passage from William Faulkner's "Dry September":

****

Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass--the rumor, the story, whatever it was. Something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro. Attached, insulted, frightened: none of them, gathered in the barber shop on that Saturday evening where the ceiling fan stirred, without freshening it, the vitiated air, sending back upon them, in recurrent surges of stale pomade and lotion, their own stale breath and odors, knew exactly what had happened.

"Except it wasn't Will Mayes," a barber said.

*****

And here's my imitation...I think it was worth doing, even though I went off the rails:

All through a wet June, days of sopping, gray, indoor weather, we dreamed of it--our summer of no plans spread across sun-struck days. No school. Too young for jobs, lazy, restless: each mother's child of us watched TV or played endless games of Go Fish and Crazy Eights while it rained and rained and rained, and we still imagined wringing from our summer vacation every drop of sugar, every whiff of strawberries and fresh green beans, every drop of indolent pleasure to be had if only the sun would shine.

"What we need is a canoe," Jacy said.

(9 of 40) Your Steering Committee

2011-09-21T13:01:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago I was invited to a day-long retreat as a member of the steering committee for my college's Teaching and Learning Cooperative. My friend and colleague, Paul Marshall, IS our TLC and he arranged for us to meet in a lovely space in Edmonds, Washington, and provided plenty of coffee, pastry, and fresh pears. Later we had a box lunch.

During our retreat we worked in small groups to create lists of what the TLC was doing well, what it could do better, and what we thought its priorities should be for the next year. We wrote our lists on posters and (if I remember right) cut pictures out of magazines to illustrate them.

As I drove home -- a beautiful, blue sky day in February -- I wondered why individuals don't have steering committees. Wouldn't you like to have a group of interested friends helping you map out your priorities? (I don't know about your friends, but mine won't usually agree to sit around a table talking about me for several minutes, let alone several hours.)

I think we do have our own versions of the steering committee. And I wonder if we could assemble this group a little more consciously. Maybe we could call it our "cheering committee."

Hmm. Some of the people on my steering committee: my friend Paul, Carolynne, my writing friends Priscilla and Janet and Margaret and Carla, my friends Shawna and Therese (each with her own set of girl-twins), Glenda Lewis, Emily Dickinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Grace Paley. (Gee, suddenly I can think of too many to name.)

My steering committee likes my blog. Now that my novel is finished (!) I need to reconvene them so they can tell me what to work on next. ;)

(8 of 40) Ten Tangible Things

2011-09-20T17:03:00.000-07:00

Last night in class we did an exercise from Priscilla Long's THE WRITER'S PORTABLE MENTOR. It involves 1) generating a list of essays/stories/or other pieces you would like to write, then 2) choosing one of the items from your list and freewriting for five minutes, then 3) listing 10 tangible -- TANGIBLE, that is not abstract but concrete -- things that you could include in that theoretical piece. Here are 10 things on my list for a blogpost to be titled "The Steering Committee": a pear, coffee, Edmonds, my friend Paul, black markers, poster board, a list (isn't a list tangible?), stairs, blue sky, autumn leaves.

(7 of 40) Freewriting

2011-09-19T14:48:00.000-07:00

2:56 p.m.

As I often tell my students, Freewriting isn't free. Well, except for the ink freely flowing from your pen, it isn't free. Begin by setting a timer (your stove timer, or the APP on your cellphone), or by jotting down your start time so you can calculate as you go along. I usually ask students to write for ten minutes, but different time spans -- longer ones -- can yield impressive results. In WRITING THE MIND ALIVE: THE PROPRIOCEPTIVE METHOD FOR FINDING YOUR AUTHENTIC VOICE, Linda Trichter Metcalf and Simon Tobin recommend writing for 22 minutes, which is also the length of a piece of music they recommend listening to as you write. You can write on any topic you choose. But you have to keep writing.

What if you can't think of anything more to write and the clock is still ticking? Metcalf and Tobin suggest that you spin off from what you just wrote.

I love the blue sky today. What do I mean by "blue"? It is mostly blue with gauzy clouds like voile curtains, and few other clouds like cotton balls. The blue is a robin's egg blue, no that can't be right. Sky blue? I need a box of crayons. What do I mean by "love"?
Heather Sellers, whose books are PAGE AFTER PAGE and CHAPTER AFTER CHAPTER (two of my faves), suggests drawing a little spiral, from the inside out. It must be Natalie Goldberg -- but maybe Peter Elbow -- who first defined freewriting and said to write "I don't know what to write. I don't know what else I can say. This is a dumb assignment!" until your brain switches back on and gives you something better.

That's my freewrite on freewriting.

3:09 p.m

image from http://www.mecabrush.com/images/icons/airbrush_color_chart.gif.

(6:40) Overcoming the Blank Page

2011-09-18T13:19:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of every quarter, I have my Creative Nonfiction students do a number of warm up writing exercies that can fuel their writing for the next ten weeks -- or for a lifetime. One of these is the 30 chapters exercise (number 1-30 down the left-hand margin of the page; write I AM BORN beside #1; then fill in the rest of the chapters; follow up by doing a 10-minute freewrite on any one -- eventually all -- of the chapters; another approach is to choose a chapter and see if you can brainstorm a list of 30 components for it).

We also do a grid exercise. Draw a tic-tac-toe grid (there, no more blank page). Now fill in each of the 9 squares with a word or phrase that reminds you of a trip you've taken. The trips can be big or small.

1. Driving to Ashland.
2. Flying home from Taos in 2008.
3. Denny's with Emma.
4. Hawaii when I was 21.
5. Hawaii with my husband and kids.
6. Driving to Coos Bay for my niece's wedding.
7. Taking my horse to the fair.
8. My trip to NY.
9. Picking up Mom at the airport.

Choose ONE and write for 10 minutes without stopping. My only additional advice is to avoid abstractions--write through your five senses--what can you still see, taste, hear, feel, and smell about this one trip?

(5:40) What Do You Do Best?

2011-09-17T11:01:00.000-07:00

This is a list exercise that I do with my students. Step one: List 10 Things You Do Well

1. Write a syllabus for a college class
2. Write bad poems
3. Drive a mini-van
4. Play Spider-Solitaire
5. Shop for blue jeans for my daughters
6. Arrange chairs in a circle for class
7. Laundry
8. Make cabbage rolls
9. Read a novel
10. Iron a blouse

Step two: choose one item from the list and write about it for 10 minutes. I'll give you three minutes here (to keep it short).

My recipe for cabbage rolls came from my Aunt Violet, who married into a Polish family. Hamburger and rice rolled into cabbage leaves (leaves first softened in hot water), then layered into a pot with brown sugar. Lots of brown sugar. (I can't vouch for the authenticity of the recipe, as my own grandmother never cooked anything without putting sugar into it.) When I mix up the hamburger and rice, I salt and pepper it, and I add garlic and grated carrot or zucchini. Bake at 400 degrees, uncovered, for about 30 minutes; then bake at 350 degrees for an hour or so. I'm not great at describing smells, but it smells wonderful. And as a bonus, I never make this dish without thinking about my Aunt Violet, who -- many years older than my mother -- was one of the great matriarchs who presided over my childhood. In my memory, she's in her late thirties or early forties. Her hair is in a hairnet (later her daughters talked her into cutting and perming it), her round face is red from the steam of the kitchen. She's wearing an apron. On the windowsill of her kitchen is a little woodpecker that, when I tap his head, dips into a bin of toothpicks and pulls one out.

Okay, that was more than 3 minutes. The woodpecker surprised me. (I found the picture on EBay.)

(4:40) What's Your Ritual?

2011-09-16T14:08:00.000-07:00

After Monday's class, Margaret sent us an email encouraging everyone to establish a daily spiritual practice in addition to a writing practice. I kind of think my writing practice is my spiritual practice, and Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones, Wild Mind and many other books), as well as Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way, plus) would agree with me.

But Margaret makes a good point. Currently what I do to ease into my writing time is to either make a cup of coffee (at home), really strong coffee, or to buy a double-tall, nonfat latte (when I'm writing in my car). The coffee is the signal, the anchor, that tells me, "Here's your writing time."

What if, instead, I tried putting my feet squarely on the floor, closing my eyes, and practicing breathing?

Don't look for me to give up drinking coffee. But I'll give this a whirl.

While I'm at it, I'll take down this book from my shelf: Writing Begins with the Breath, by Laraine Herring.

(3:40) -- Writing Spaces

2011-09-15T10:17:00.000-07:00

Last night I had that dream, the one in which I wander through my house and discover (or remember) unused rooms.

The rooms were furnished, big armchairs and tables. Kitchens. I walked around, stunned. All these rooms, I kept thinking. All the time I've had all these rooms! Many years ago, when I was trying to get pregnant, and then trying to adopt, I would find nurseries. These rooms were writing spaces.

Two years ago my daughter Annie, who had all her life up to that moment shared a bedroom with her twin sister, decided she had to have her own space. I was trying to work (grading papers at UBS in their coffee shop) and she kept texting and calling, crying, angry because I wouldn't fix this situation immediately.

Then, a woman sitting on the couch across from me moved over and asked me what was going on. My first thought, was "how rude." But we chatted and -- I don't know if this will hit you the way it hit me, as one of the universe's amazing coincidences -- I discovered that she is an adoption counselor who specializes in teens. And you know we're an adoptive family, right?

I explained that Annie had decided she should have my office, which also serves as our guest room -- a fourth bedroom downstairs in our house. We'd been wrangling peaceably about this for a while, with me holding my ground. But now some conflict between the girls had accelerated it. Annie was really, really upset. I explained the whole dynamic. She listened attentively, then said, "Give her the room."

I put my student papers back in my bookbag and I went home and moved out of my office. You should know, too, that I am not good at this sort of thing, but the girls' best friend Shana stopped by (she's really good at that stuff) and pitched in to help. Within two hours, my office was stored in a corner of the playroom and Annie had her own bedroom. Did I feel good about losing my home office? No. Did I love the bliss Annie was communicating with her every expression and gesture? Yes.

For a while I coped with my corner of the playroom. Then I gave up. I don't have a home office anymore. I have a green chair in the corner of the living room (which works when no one is awake in the house except me), and I have my car, where I write a surprising amount.

Where do you write?

(2:40) Writing in Meetings

2011-09-14T14:27:00.000-07:00

Today I sat in a meeting for 2 1/2 hours. It was a good meeting with lots of friendly faces, but it was still a meeting. And what I really wanted to do was write.

Imagination always has a door open. Don't worry, your boss will think you're taking notes.

When you called the meeting to order, I slipped out the window, a wisp of cloud wrapped around the last maple leaves, drifting upward like a plume of smoke. When you projected the budget onto the white screen at the front of the room, I hunkered behind my coffee cup, small as a toy soldier dodging a hail of words. When you pulled the meeting back to the agenda, I was a pirate with a patch over one eye and a green parrot on my shoulder. When you asked if there were any questions, I stuck my gray plume of self like a feather into my tri-cornered hat. When you called for a motion, I picked up a pen. When you called for a show of hands, I began to write.

(1:40) Forty Days

2011-09-13T09:49:00.000-07:00

What if you decided to write -- for at least fifteen minutes -- every day for the next forty days? It doesn't have to be good. It could be scribbling. You could write about the weather. You could write about a dream you had last night. About your teenaged daughter. About the trees in your backyard. About your dad's shop when you were a little kid.

Write in longhand in a notebook. Some people like to title their entries; I just put the date at the top of mine. Although I know it's good practice to type up an entry once a week or so, I usually don't. I just write.

When I don't know what to write, I write lists. Priscilla Long's book, The Writer's Portable Mentor, is what first pushed me to write extreme lists: one hundred things I'm grateful for; one hundred things I want; one hundred questions. (One list will do.) And you can go back and circle or highlight a smaller number of the items -- maybe you want the war to end, your 18 year old to get a better job, to quit eating chips, and to repot the plant your friend Therese gave you for your birthday, oh, yeah, and to buy a blue pot for the plant. Could you, today, DO ONE THING ON YOUR LIST? I could buy a blue pot.

Give it a try! I dare you!

Writing & Spirituality: Steps in the Journey

2011-09-09T10:31:00.000-07:00

We still have a couple spots open in our class. It begins Monday, Sept. 12 (6:15-8:30) and runs for six Mondays (until October 17). We'll be meeting at a wonderful private residence in Edmonds and tuition is $185.

Contact me if you are interested and I'll send you the flyer.

Ezra Pound

2011-09-08T16:25:00.000-07:00

I wrote this poem into my current poetry notebook, and have been rereading it almost every day. You have to say it aloud to really feel it.

The Tree

I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,
Knowing the truth of things unseen before;
Of Daphne and the laurel bough
And that god-feasting couple old
That grew elm-oak amid the wold.
'Twas not until the gods had been
Kindly entreated, and been brought within
Unto the hearth of their heart's home
That they might do this wonder thing;
Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood
And many a new thing understood
That was rank folly to my head before.

-Ezra Pound

Willa Cather, about families

2011-08-30T16:36:00.000-07:00

"In all families the struggle to have anything of one's own, to be one's self at all, creates a strain that keeps everybody almost to the breaking point...even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe...and underneath, another, secret and passionate and intense--which is the real life that stamps faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member (of the family) is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven around him....One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life...every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them."

-Willa Cather, writing about Katherine Mansfield (a quote I picked up at a workshop with novelist Jane Hamilton)

The Moon, Singing

2011-08-20T11:02:00.000-07:00

Late in the evening, mid-August, and I watch the moon
tangle itself in an Alaskan cedar, a tree
my Botany teacher taught me to recognize
by its extreme droopiness. That was thirty years ago.
I remember how long because my cousin
died that summer and I failed the Botany final.
My worst grade for a class ever, although at the time
it didn't matter, and it doesn't matter now
as I sit brooding on how my cousin will never see
the moon again. To what world do the dead go?
It's late. I've been reading Graham Greene
and thinking about my father, who loved to read.
The moon is full tonight. The moon is full
of sad songs tonight, singing like a tone-deaf preacher,
its voice tripping over the consonants,
stretching every vowel into a drunken dirge.

14 August 2011

Writing and Spirituality

2011-08-18T14:06:00.000-07:00

Beginning September 12, my friend and colleague, Margaret Riordan, and I will be offering a class called, very simply, "Writing and Spirituality." Six Monday evenings, 6:15-8:30, in Edmonds. Contact me if you'd like more information and I'll send you a flyer.

Oh my gosh...

2011-08-15T14:27:00.000-07:00

If you want to write, if you want a boost to your creativity whatever that may be, go to http://www.williamkenower.com/author-magazine.html and watch the two videos he has posted there.

And now I have to get back to writing.

Summer Days, Summer Days

2011-08-15T12:14:00.000-07:00

When I was small enough
that any laurel hedge
was an arbor,
the world came along with me,
silent as road tar
on the sole of my sneaker.
All the names of flowers were one name,
and the colors of sky
were blue, and blue.
When my mother called,
I didn't answer.
The laurel leaves were large as postcards.
With a stick, I traced across a leaf
the letters of my name.

quotable

2011-08-11T11:25:00.000-07:00

"Enlightenment is not a matter of imagining figures of light, but of making the darkness conscious." -C. G. Jung

If you're really listening...

2011-08-04T10:29:00.001-07:00

If you're really listening, if you're awake to the
poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly.
In fact, your heart is made to break;
its purpose is to burst open again and again
so that it can hold ever-more wonders.

-Andrew Harvey (qtd. in Laraine Herring, THE WRITING WARRIOR)

Which World Today?

2011-07-30T04:16:00.000-07:00

I wake pregnant with possibility.
Which world should I embrace?
One with a wild pond in it,
or the one with the gaudy blossoms of old ladies' gardens?
All-day suckers and whirl-a-gig rides?
I try building a wall of books
to hide behind. The world leans in,
multiple as a kaleidescope,
laughs at me scratching out my plans
with my rusty pen.

Maybe Heaven

2011-07-25T17:50:00.000-07:00

I'm standing at the kitchen window when I see something moving beyond the orchard fence. At first I think it's one of Dad's cows, maybe a calf, and then I remember that there are no longer any cows here. Then a deer lifts her head, sniffing the air, and then it springs over the fence into the orchard. I call Mom to the window to watch with me, and a big fawn follows its mother. There's no fruit this year, Mom says. So we haven't seen many deer. The doe stops grazing and looks up, into the kitchen window. Does she see only her reflection, or does she see our faces? She stands a long time and we stand, too. At church this morning, Mom's pastor quoted Paul, that we see through a glass darkly and we can't know what heaven is like. But in these moments, when the last of the day's sun falls over the orchard like beaten gold, when the trees are green, like jasper, under an amethyst sky, I think I know where I am.

Picture to share...

2011-07-25T16:56:00.000-07:00

This was posted on Facebook by an old friend, but it is a postcard that I have somewhere in my collection, the railroad trestle over the Chehalis River, just outside Doty, Washington, where I went to church as a child, and close to where I grew up.