Writing Salon Mistress Muses

Walking & Writing

I have more to say (surprise!) about my last post. Much more. However, I feel like a change of pace, so..... just so you don't think I've become nothing but a boring BCO Blogger (Breast Cancer Obsessed Blogger), I'd like to add that I've been working away on the new spring session schedule of Writing Salon classes, and am rather excited about a new class we'll be offering called Walking & Writing, taught by Stephen Vincent.

Stephen just sent me a short series of some of his own writings that he did (or started) while out walking around San Francisco. The writings are coupled with photos that he also took while out walking, and the series is titled Ghost Walks. Here's a small, lovely excerpt from Ghost Walks.

More about Walking & Writing later, but right now I am inspired, partly by Stephen, to go out for my three-mile walk before the next downpour arrives. This time I'm taking my new Nanopod because, as much as I enjoy the peacefulness of walking in silence, I also sometimes get bored with that. I want to whisk myself around Bernal Hill to the sounds of music today. Maybe a little Zydeco and World Beat.

Personal Truths

After a time, some of us learn (and some more slowly than others) that life comes down to some simple things. How we love, how alert we are, how curious we are. Love, attention, curiosity. . . . One way we learn this lesson is by listening to others tell us true stories of their own struggles to come to a way of understanding. It is sometimes comforting to know that others seem to fail as often and as oddly as we do. . . . And it is even more comforting to have such stories told to us with style, the way a writer has found to an individual expression of truth. — Scott Walker

No more time for posting today. Jack and I are soon on our way to see tonight's Word for Word preview of Daniel Handler's 4 Adverbs at Theater Artaud. All about different perspectives on love.

The Truth Is. . .

I'm going to take the easy way out this morning, and do a cut and paste blog entry. Below is an excerpt from a book about writing, which I typed out last night to send to my Round Robin class members. Since the Round Robin is a class that requires students to write from prompts for 10 to 12 minutes a day, every day (without planning ahead of time what they want to write), I especially wanted them to note the graph that I've put in bold.


"All of my friends, and most of my acquaintances, are writers of one sort or another, or editors or agents who deal with writers constantly. But it's remarkable how little I know of what happens to writers when they're actually alone writing.

If the way my mind works when I'm trying to write has any resemblance to the way real writers' minds work, then I pity them all. When I have time to write, the ideas aren't there — or if the ideas, then not the words. Forcing myself to put the words on paper helps not at all: insights become platitudes as phrased when writing under self-imposed duress. You see?!

If I determine once and for all to finish up a section which has been "nearly finished" for months, then the simplest transitional paragraph evokes related but irrelevant speculations and I find myself furiously scribbling thoughts that get further and further from what I was intending to do, that cover material I know I must some time write, but it's material that I'll want to have make a different point from the point I'm making with it now.

Still, one often stares so blankly for so long at the paper to no avail that to be writing anything -- and this fast! -- is to be exploited while it lasts. And perhaps there are some sentences in it that when later combined with the laborious, correctly directed writing-under-duress can be organized to say what it is that's needed.

Combining them, then, later -- determined this time to make a coherent sequence out of all these scraps and all these sets of three or four pages of hasty handwriting, some retyped some not -- I try to construct some sort of bridge between two of these passages, some transitional passage, which somehow gets me started on a related train of thought, but certainly not the one that's needed here, and off I go again, wildly and enthusiastically (but despairingly) scribbling something I hope is good and may have some use later: another disjointed passage to puzzle over.

This is a sample of that.

Can I use it to say that the necessary, planned writing is often the most pedestrian, if not actually awkward, and that what seems most useless when it is being written will often prove not only best but eventually central, because it flows as it comes -- which it wouldn't do if it were wrong with the mind, with your own real thoughts on the matter?

But that's not it, not really. Sometimes I can see not only exactly what it was I meant in such-and-such a passage, but also a use for it with a whole new slant. I can comprehend the whole. I can see beyond a few pages to where so-and-so might lead. Befuddlement passes. Super ego sneaks away in shame. Energy releases clarity. Clarity releases energy. What paralyzes a writer is the inability to see where what he is writing is going -- to see the connections between the aspects of his work. Concentration is all that's needed, really. A deadline releases nervous energy. Adrenalin flows. There's someone who wants the work, is waiting for it. Encouragement's coming, is on the way. No, again that's not it, really. It's more than that. The truth is that the only way not to feel really terrible is to work."

    from Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular, by L. Rust Hills

It's Time Again

"It's time again. Tear up the violets and plant something more difficult to grow." —James Schuyler

Every time I read this quote, I like it more. There they are in the same sentence: destruction, killing, the taking of a life—on one end. Gentleness, nurturing, the creating of a life—on the other end. How does one brave, and then bear, the pain of ripping out the violet?

That's the challenge, the lesson, the prayer.
 

 

The Opinions of Others

Today a quote:

Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth. — Katherine Mansfield, from The Journal of Katherine Mansfield

. . . and a Billy Collins poem, the first one I went to this morning, that was on a page that had its top corner folded down. There were several other pages with folded-down corners, but this was the first one I opened, so I'll stick with that:

In the Room of a Thousand Miles

I like writing about where I am,
where I happen to be sitting,
the humidity or the clouds,
the scene outside the window—
a pink tree in bloom,
a neighbor walking his small, nervous dog.
And if I am drinking
a cup of tea at the time
or a small glass of whiskey,
I will find a line to put it on.

My wife hands these poems back to me
with a sigh.
She thinks I ought to be opening up
my aperture to let in
the wild rhododendrons of Ireland,
the sun-blanched stadiums of Rome,
that waterclock in Bruges—
the world beyond my inkwell.

I tell her I will try again
and travel back to my desk
where the chair is turned to the window.
I think about the furniture of history.
I consider the globe, the lights of its cities.
I visualize a lion rampant on an iron shield,
a quiet battlefield, a granite monument.

And then—just between you and me—
I take a swallow of cold tea
and in the manner of the ancient Chinese
pick up my thin pen
and write down that bird I hear outside,
the one that sings,
pauses,
then sings again.

Makin' Do

    Anything to do with interior decoration or home renovation makes me drool. I love to read House Beautiful magazine and Architectural Digest. I rip out pages of rooms I'd like to have, wall colors I prefer, furniture finishes that work for me, rug textures I most desire, floor stains that transform a room, light fixtures that I am convinced would improve my life and the lives of all my friends a hundredfold.
    I don't have the moola to spend on redecorating my house the way I'd like to. But I don't feel like spending the next ten years sitting on the floor of an empty room looking at empty walls. So I go to the Salvation Army thriftstore and buy mismatched chairs and funky old couches. I scrounge for dishes, vases and lamps at garage sales. I mop the splintering fir floors with Murphy's Oil soap, working with with what I have: a rented house with floors that have seen better days.  I make do with perfect, dreamy squares of sunlight on less than perfect wood. It isn't my ideal. But it works for me.
    My work-with-what-you-have philosophy also applies to writing. If I have only ten minutes a day plus one three-hour chunk per week to write (instead of, say, twenty-five hours a week) I make do with that. And when I end up with an 800 word personal essay suitable for the neighborhood newspaper instead of a 5000 word literary memoir suitable for the New Yorker, I'm okay with that.
    I'm most likely not (never say never) going to be a Pulitzer Prize winner in literature. Chances are I won't even get into a Best American Essays anthology (although I'd certainly have a better chance if I'd get it together to submit an essay to a literary magazine more than once every two years!).
    Bottom line: I keep on writing with as much muscle and heart as I can muster, and every now and then I hit my stride, cross the line, flow into the zone, transcend, and make ART.

Poem by Julie Bruck

A few days ago I wrote one of my periodic "we must not let poetry die" posts. In it I included part of a poem by Alison Luterman, who'll be teaching a five-week poetry class at the Berkeley Writing Salon, in November. At the end of the post, I said I'd add a poem, later, by Julie Bruck, who will be teaching a five-week poetry class at the San Francisco Writing Salon, from mid-October to mid-November. Here's the poem:

Raft

A boy kills himself at fifteen,
and it takes his sister most of a life
to emerge from those deep waters,
something always sucking her under.

She'd just begun to slip
out of that old, wet dress
when she wrote her brother an elegy,
offering him rest:

There is a raft in the centre
of my chest, she wrote
before she or anyone else knew
what flowered in her lung.

It's a beautiful poem, we said,
It's finished, and we turned
to other matters. Climb on,
she'd written, Make use of me.

Keep reading this one. Its ripples go out and out.

Lovely, Bright Orange, and Weightless

How do you make the time to write when your floor is only half mopped, you haven't been to Walgreen's yet, and you need to revise your lesson plan for the class you are teaching TONIGHT? Forget writing - how do you make the time to take a shower? Wash and dry your hair? Wash the hard-to-reach middle of your neglected back? Get dressed? Eat breakfast? Feed the cat? Forget the cat. Let her find a bird. Then go find your copy of Anne Lamott's book, Bird by Bird. Close your eyes, open the book, and point to a random line on a random page. Copy it into your blog as fast as your frantic little fingers can go:

One of the things that happens when you give yourself permission to start writing is that you start thinking like a writer. You start seeing everything as material. Sometimes you'll sit down or go walking and your thoughts will be on one aspect of your work, or one idea you have for a small scene, or a general portrait of one of the characters you are working with, or you'll just be completely blocked and hopeless and wondering why you shouldn't just go into the kitchen and have a nice glass of warm gin straight out of the cat dish. And then, unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere, a thought or image arrives. Some will float into your head like goldfish, lovely, bright orange, and weightless, and you follow them like a child looking at an aquarium that was thought to be without fish. . .

I love that last line, don't you? It has inspired me for the rest of the day. I feel like maybe I too can be a wildly imaginative writer if I just hang in there. In fact, I just may race out to Walgreen's in my pajamas and fuzzy leopard print slippers. (And the point to my not getting dressed would BE...? No point. As my NYC girlfriend Ms. K wrote to me this morning, 'FORTUNATELY, THE PARTS OF LIFE THAT ARE REALLY INTERESTING ARE NOT LOGICAL.')

 

Montreal Here I Come!

May 25, 2005

Next Wednesday I'm getting on a plane to Montreal, going to my son's graduation from circus school. That's right, circus school. He's an acrobat. He found his right livelihood early on in life (at the age of five). What a gift. His major is "hand to hand." Graduation, for him, means being in a big performance for ten days running. I'm excited, I haven't seen him since December. He didn't come home for summer vacation last year because he went to Europe instead. He paid for his trip and expenses, as he traveled from country to country - England, France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Spain, I forget where else - by doing street performances and gigs at festivals. In London, he and the other four members of his "troupe" looked for a traffic intersection with a long stop light. When they found one that lasted two minutes, that's where they performed. They'd do their tricks for a minute, then run around to car windows collecting donations. They made $300 in an hour. That got divided by five, but still! When I was his age, I was working for $2 an hour as a chicken girl at Woolworth's.

What does this have to do with writing? I don't know. Nothing and everything. It has to do with writing because in order to write you have to figure out how to create the space in your life to practice writing. That's a challenge, because you have to do other things at the same time, like raise families and make a living. Only a small portion of writers make a living from writing. I have the statistics on that somewhere. Maybe I'll find them and post them someday. Even FAMOUS writers resort to teaching, consulting, etc. Then of course there are the ones who have entire other careers in addition to their writing. William Carlos Williams was a doctor. Wallace Stevens was a businessman. Bill Clinton had to do a stint as president of the United States, for heaven's sake, in order to come up with the fodder for HIS memoir. Jane Fonda had to prance around as Barbarella before she was able to write HER memoir. (Plus she had to marry Tom Hayden, Ted Turner, and I forget the first hubbie's name — some lady's man director who wanted Jane to do threesomes. Plus, after all that, she had to go and become a born again Christian.)

Possessed, Obsessed, Yes!

The well known blogstress Maude Newton reigns over a blogsite that averages 4,000 hits a day,  according to a piece she wrote for Maisonneuve about blogging, back in October of 2004.   Maude is a person obsesseed. Obsessions are such interesting things. Fabulous fodder for writers.

My WOW for today: Mine your obessions obsessively.

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