Prairie and Poetry

I’m still shaking the dust of the Zumwalt Prairie out of my shoes after a week in northeastern Oregon at the Fishtrap Outpost workshop. I spent 5-1/2 days there with 12 other writers, a naturalist, and essayist Scott Russell Sanders, “Giving Voice to Earth.”

Despite efforts to write fresh descriptions, it’s hard to avoid over-used superlatives like magical, awesome, and incredible. Here’s one of my attempts to put the experience into words.

Tent lodging on the Zumwalt Prairie

View from Buckhorn Lookout

Sunset on the Zumwalt

Out on the Zumwalt, Jan peppers us with the vocabulary of the prairie. Each day, this biologist answers our “What’s this?” with terms new to me:  gum weed, creamy buckwheat, prairie smoke, vesper sparrow, Belding’s ground squirrel, rock jack, exclosure, desire path.  I scribble the words in my notebook, just as I did in January at the start of my first poetry craft class.  Then, my teacher peppered me too, with iambic pentameter, off-rhyme, sestina, slant rhyme, terza rima, and trochee.  All semester, writing at my home in Washington’s San Juan Islands, I wrestled with these forms, as unfamiliar to my prose pen as the buttes, grasslands, and draws of this Oregon prairie.


At the end of Outpost, I joined other writers for the conclusion of Summer Fishtrap Gathering of Writers. There I sat propped against granite rock beside the Wallowa River, on its race toward Wallowa Lake.  I washed the prairie’s dust from my hands in the river’s icy flow, strong enough to skirt a 24-foot remnant of a tree that once shaded the river’s banks.  I wished Jan had been there to name the squirrel exploring the tree’s roots and the bird skipping and chirping across the ridged bark. However, that landscape of pine-robed mountains surging upward from the river valley is more akin to my spiritual home in the North Cascades. It was there, in a tiny village on the Stehekin River, that I sought direction about vocation. I encountered teachers on mossy outcrops, in glacier-fed creeks, and on switch-backing trails shared with marmots and black bears.

As I wrote in my journal at river’s edge, I thought of the next day when I’d return to a different landscape, one with salt- and seaweed-scented air, tides and rocky beaches, Madrones and Nootka roses, bald eagle trills and blue heron squawks. Just as at the end of my poetry class in the spring, I closed my time on the Zumwalt with new sources of inspiration and appreciation. Poetry’s rhythms and shapes inform my prose. The prairie’s sounds, smells, textures, and terrain spur my awareness of earth’s beauty, power, and fragility. They also renew my commitment to give voice to the places I call home.

 

Last moments of sunset on the prairie

Afterthought #17 – Word Count

That work on my thesis last semester (Two Down, One to Go)?   It paid off.  Here’s where I started in January:

By the end of the semester, I was here:

Yesterday, I took my thumb drive to Paper, Scissors on the Rock, the local office supply shop, and watched the printer churn out the sheets—a complete draft of Hiking Naked­—A Quaker Woman’s Search for Balance; Prologue through Chapter 20; 241 pages; 68,645 words.

If I’d kept track of all the words I wrote, cut, then re-wrote, well, the count would be about double.  And then there’s the revising and editing yet to do—thousands more words.  But for now, I’m pausing to relish this step: 68,645 down, ???? to go.

Beginning in January 2012, I instituted posting an “Afterthought” on the last day of each month, fashioned after a practice in some Quaker meetings. After meeting for worship ends, some groups continue in silence for a few more minutes during which members are invited to share thoughts or reflect on the morning's worship. I’ve adopted the form here for brief reflections on headlines, quotes, comments overheard, maybe even bumper stickers.

Two Down, One to Go

Last month I finished the spring semester of my second year in the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts MFA in Creative Writing Program. I’m on the three-year plan, on track to graduate one year from now.

This semester was the most demanding yet.  I took my first poetry course­—Craft of Poetry—which I compared to studying a foreign language (see Beginning Again, January 2013). I also signed up for five thesis credits, which required me to work diligently on my memoir manuscript. The workload was heavy:  reading, analyzing, and discussing at least a dozen poems each week; writing a poem a week and critiquing poems of my classmates; writing or revising a memoir chapter each week. No wonder my primary ambitions right now are to work crossword puzzles and sleep.

Friends have asked me if I’m glad that I’m in this program and what I’ve learned by going back to school.  To the first question, even on the most challenging days, I answer a wholehearted, “Yes.”   The answer to the second question is harder to quantify, but here’s some of what I’ve learned these past two years.

• Narrative nonfiction is an art and a craft that draws on skills and techniques in structure, dialogue, scenes, character development, setting, and reflection. I’m studying the theory and honing my own skill through practice and experimentation.
•  Practice and experimentation yield the best results with time and commitment to pen on paper, fingers on keyboard.
•  Reading, particularly directed reading that includes analysis of craft techniques, is building my writer’s toolbox.  I’ve gained many tools by reading memoirs, essays, and short works in fiction, nonfiction, and prose poetry.
•  Deadlines (either self- or teacher-imposed) motivate me, especially on days I question the value of my writing or feel pulled to other responsibilities—or pleasures.
•  Reading and writing poetry and fiction help my nonfiction writing.
• The writing profession requires promotion, networking, collaboration, and continuing education.

This next year will bring more learning, more experimentation, and more deadlines.  In the fall I’ll be in a nonfiction workshop—writing and revising new pieces as well as my memoir, reading and critiquing writing of classmates—and a course in literary journalism. That second course is a new one offered by nonfiction teacher Larry Cheek who describes how literary journalism, also known as narrative nonfiction, “…blends journalistic capture of events and personalities with narrative technique and style once assumed to be the domain of fiction.”  Along with Larry and four other students, I’ll be reading and analyzing work by, among others, Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, Joan Didion, and the first writer in this genre, George Orwell. Should be an enlightening return to my first love­—journalism.

Until I start that one more year to go, though, I’ll be reading more poetry (for fun) and maybe a novel or two, making my way through a stack of crossword puzzles, and catching up on some sleep.

Get a Really Nice Journal

Author Amy Tan  gave a lecture in Seattle last week; I sat in a nearly sold-out auditorium to hear her talk about her writing process and who she is as a writer.

I didn’t know whether to feel reassured or discouraged when she said, “I revise constantly—usually 100 times,” and “I’ve never written a novel I consider to be finished.”

Tan spoke my mind with, “What I observe becomes what I’m writing, and what I’m writing influences what I observe,” and “I write to understand who I am.”

I especially appreciated the response she gave to a teacher’s question about what advice she would give to young readers.

“Read, read, read,” Tam said. “And keep a journal.”  Tan spoke about the value of making notes about your thoughts, your observations, dreams, and memories.  “In fact,” she went on, “make someone buy you a really nice journal.”

I did a mental pump fist with that last recommendation.  I had been putting the final touches on a limited edition set of hand-bound writing journals for a show at Chimera Gallery, and I was hoping that people would find them inspiring.  They’re really nice journals. 

Even more than hearing Tan’s support of journals like those that I make, I appreciated her acknowledgment of the act of putting pen to paper.  Although I do most of my composing, revising, and editing on a computer (and frankly wouldn’t want to have to give up this invention), I appreciate the benefits of writing longhand in a blank journal. 

Long before people had computers, journaling was a part of Quaker practice.  In 1972, Howard Brinton published Quaker Journals following his study of the 300 journals in his own library.  He found they all had several things in common:  simplicity and truth in writing; personal experiences, experiences in early childhood, and dreams were only written about if the writer believed they had religious significance; humility.  He also found they recorded similar stages of development:  divine revelations in childhood, then a period of youthful playfulness (usually looked back upon as a waste of time), an experience of a divided self, and finally following the leadings of the Light.

Mary Morrison, a writer and former Pendle Hill teacher, has this to say about journaling in Live the Questions:  Write into the Answers:  “A journal is an instrument of awareness, through which we can watch what we do so we can find out who we are.” Amy Tan would agree.

And from Ann Broyles in Journaling – A Spiritual Journey:  “Journaling becomes spiritual discipline when we use pen and paper to strengthen our faith in God. We can use journaling as a companion to prayer, Bible study, fasting, or any other spiritual discipline that is already part of our life in God. Journaling can be a significant tool in deepening our spiritual lives because by its nature it leads us to further revelation of who we are and who God is in our lives.”

How about you?  Is journaling part of your writing and/or spiritual practice? 

Do you have a really good journal?

Afterthought #17 - a few more

Thanks to readers for adding to the list of  four-letter words worth keeping:

         food   tree   frog   yarn   mint   beer   wine   taco  rest   soon   done.

Since I just celebrated my birthday, I can't forget:

                                 cake.

Speaking of birthdays, this year I spent mine in Portland, Oregon. My sister-in-law is a guide for Urban Tours, so she led my husband (her brother) and me to noteworthy sites in downtown Portland. A stop at The Heathman Hotel was a highlight; I showed my writer geekiness with a slow stroll through the hotel's collection of first edition books by authors who have stayed there.

The next day, we went to Eugene where I collected my prize for first place (student category)  in the Oregon Quarterly Northwest Perspectives Essay Contest: a writing workshop with contest judge Ellen Waterston and a public reading by the contest winners (you can read the winning essays
here; mine is "Boris's Bluff). 

As you'll discover when you read this fine magazine, it's published by the University of Oregon.
Better add one more four-letter word to my list: 

                               duck.*


*University of Oregon mascot

Four-Letter Words

Growing up in the Midwest, four-letter words were forbidden in my household, at least by kids.  My mom warned that if I said them, she’d wash my mouth out with soap.  I believed her, because she did it one time, not for uttering a four-letter word, but as punishment for “talking back.”

Four-letter words get a bad rap. Here’s how the American Heritage Dictionary defines them:

                  four-let·ter word (fôr ˈletər wərd)

                           n.  Any of several short

                           English words

                           generally regarded

                           as vulgar or obscene.

Sure, there are some nasty ones that I wouldn’t mind having washed away:

                        hate   rape   pain  rude  liar   feud   

                        fake  jail   hurt  sick  fear   kill.

And some are even more obscene with just three letters: 

                                                war.

There’s a simplicity and honesty about short words, though, that I value. Here are a few that I plan to keep in my vocabulary:

        read    book   sing    song   noun  verb  cook  fork  food  bake  cake  feed  note

        card   foot  toes   moon   rain (well, maybe not after weeks of it in the winter)  sail 

        pail   hike  bike  toot   vote   coat   look   like   love  seed   dirt   wool   silk   dock   

        sock  work   soon   tune  bowl   hair   care  fair   pear   milk   kilt   cove  need  help  

        fire  bird  sari  pair  tool  word  work  grin   talk   walk   duck   bead  plum  chum 

        soap   hope   boot   hoot   goat   boat   deer  dear   head  play   pray.

What four-letter words are you happy to use?

Questions

Andreanna Moya Photography

I remember a few things about a Bible study I attended thirty-five years ago.  I sat on a hard, wooden pew in the sanctuary of an inner-city Lutheran church. The minister, a lanky, shaggy-aired, pipe-smoking man who I respected deeply, paced up and down the aisles; his blue eyes rested on each of us as he taught. I can’t recall what verse or chapter we were studying; I don’t remember the points the minister made. What I do remember is raising my hand and asking a question about the text’s meaning, then feeling a churn in my stomach when the reverend’s eyes flashed disapproval. My suggestion that the Bible’s prescriptions might be open to interpretation, might need examination in current times, hung in the silent air.

Definitive answers had long been a comfort to me.  I listened, without questioning, for years to the wisdom of my parents, teachers, and ministers. I welcomed the certainty that there was an explanation, a logic, a right answer, for the many parts of life I didn’t understand. Eventually, though, somewhere around the time my Lutheran pastor frowned at my questions, such conviction began to feel stifling rather than reassuring.

This memory returned to me at last month’s spring gathering of Friends as we considered “Ways of Belonging Among Quakers.”  At the opening plenary session, four people shared stories of how they came to find a spiritual home among Quakers.  Later, in small worship-sharing groups, we considered queries about how we each came to Quakerism and what has kept us here. 

Queries. Questions.  That’s what has kept me among Friends for over thirty years.  Not only is it acceptable to ask questions, it’s expected.  We use open-ended questions that invite us to speak from our own experiences and that guide us to explore how God is leading us now, individually and collectively. 

So now, I sit in the silence—sometimes on a hard, wooden bench, but usually on a couch in a friend’s living room or on a folding chair at a Quaker gathering, at other times on a rocky beach or deep in a pine forest—and ask questions. And now, it’s the questions that sustain me through life’s mysteries.