Thursday, August 15, 2013

Enoughness


It was Day One of my writing program’s Fall Residency, and I was feeling my usual doubts about whether I’ve got the right stuff to be pursuing an MFA in writing. I’d signed up for a nonfiction workshop with eleven other students and knew that the next morning I’d receive critiques from them and my teacher, Ana Maria Spagna, of a chapter of my memoir. I’d also attended the first session of my other course, a Directed Reading in Literary Journalism taught by Larry Cheek, and was wondering how I’d get through the list of nine books and handful of articles on the syllabus for the semester.  And that was just the morning. 

After lunch, I plunged into the afternoon line-up of three, hour-long workshops by guest faculty. As often happens at the residency, I wanted to be two places at once for the last hour of that day. I had to choose between a session about “Working with Editors” led by freelance journalist Michelle Nijhuis (her earlier talk about nonfiction story ideas had been terrific) or an hour with David Oates
Writer and Teacher, David Oates
for the first of his three sessions about “The Writing Life.” As much as I craved to learn more about editor-writer relationships from Michelle, a contributing editor for High Country News, I opted for the group meeting with David. 

The view from the outdoor workshop spot
David writes nonfiction, poetry and fiction about the paradoxes of nature and culture. That, as well as the knowledge that his session was to meet outside, intrigued me, but what drew me even more was the word “joy” in the workshop blurb.  David began by quoting Adrienne Rich who used to ask her students, “Are you in it for the long haul?” By 4:30 on that first day, I was wondering the same thing, or at least was feeling uncertain of the how of making it through the next nine days, not to mention the slog a writing life can sometimes be.

I learned over dinner one evening that David has spent time around Quakers, so it’s no surprise that questions sprinkled his talk, and his writing prompts resembled queries. How to persevere as writers was the question David set out to help us answer in Part 1 of his series. He urged us to “keep sight of where the pleasure is in this arduous, solitary pursuit, and let that radiate in everything you do.” Then he asked us to write in response to these queries (I mean writing prompts):

What was the last moment of pleasure you can recall in writing?  Can you reconstruct what it consisted of?

Think about your writing life generally.  Jot some notes to yourself about your typical moment of “Ah” or “Aha”—when you know you have a potential story/poem/essay.  What is the pleasure there?

Where else (or when else) do you get a glow of satisfaction, or a burst of pleasure, in your writing process?  Is there any pattern about where or how this “writing pleasure” happens?

After the rigors and stimulation of the first day of the residency, I felt my shoulders relax and my forehead unwrinkle. I smiled to myself as I let my fingers tap across my keyboard thoughts about the times words sing and come together in ways I don’t expect.  I wrote of my pleasure in the repeated experience that writing leads me to understandings I don’t access in any other way. 

Next, David turned to an exploration of how the writing life is full of paradoxes, too. One of the contradictions for writers is the challenge to, as he described it, “write from your gut, write from your heart,” and also write for the reader.  Follow your lead and persevere,” he advised. “Be grounded in your process as a writer so that your writing isn’t dependent on what others think.” He urged us to put our work out in the world and let it find its readers. “Take pleasure in that,” he said, “pleasure in whatever audiences receive your writing.”

Which leads to another puzzle for writers: defining success.What I want in my writing life is enoughness,” David said.  “It’s ok to not be famous and fabulously successful.”  Instead, he seeks contentment in his writing life. “Have incredibly high standards, and be easily pleased,” he counseled.

Writing to David Oates’s prompts helped me make it through the residency’s incredibly high standards and pleasures and reminded me of the rewards of the writing life. In the coming weeks I’ll likely encounter more tests of my personal definition of enoughness; there undoubtedly will be rejection letters; failures as I try new writing techniques; the juggle of my school nurse job, course work, and my own creative writing.  But today, in the midst of a pile of dirty laundry, handouts and notes to file, and the beginnings of a schedule for upcoming reading, writing, and critique assignments, I know the joy of being a writer.  I light a candle and enter into silence before I begin to write. While this may be solitary work, I know I have the support of my MFA writing community and my writing groups here. And I have readers like you.  More than enough.

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Afterthought #18 – Working on the Side of Local Business


The journal I took to Fishtrap’s Outpost (see Prairie and Poetry) is filled with quotes from workshop leader Scott Russell Sanders, starting with this one relevant to the workshop theme, “Giving Voice to Earth”—

Every piece of the earth needs hearts and minds attending to it.

A series of questions Scott posed on the first day continue to guide me as I seek clarity about how to respond to the many concerns in our world:

What are the forces I want to work on the side of?
What possibility do I want to work on behalf of?

These queries have relevance for any number of conflicts, crises, and problems including the environment, health care, and war. I also thought of them last week when I read in the book trade newsletter Shelf-Awareness Pro that Amazon.com has started to offer even larger-than-usual discounts on many bestselling hardcover books.  And I returned to the queries days later when I learned that President Obama would speak about the economy at an Amazon warehouse.

I don’t begin to understand the complexities of the company’s business model, but I do know that there are concerns about wages and working conditions in its warehouses and that its tactics have driven away business from independent booksellers.  So, instead of working against a company and an approach that I believe is hurtful to local businesses and possibly to its own workforce, I’m more committed than ever to work on the side of places like my community’s local book store, Lopez Bookshop. It’s a small gesture, but one that works on behalf of a business that serves a little piece of the earth.

What are the forces you work on the side of; the possibilities you work on behalf of?




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.

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Rediscovering the Throughline


A musty smell floats in the air as I flip the pages inside the maroon covers of my high school yearbook. Cathy sits on my left, Julie on my right on my living room couch, all three of us reminiscing about people and events more than forty years ago in a small, Midwest town. This year, everyone in the Class of ’71 (the three of us included) turned sixty; last winter we three cooked up the plan to celebrate this milestone in July at my home on Lopez Island, WA.

Living as I do nearly two thousand miles from the home of my youth in Southern Illinois, and with no family members still there to pull me back, I’ve returned just a handful of times since moving west in 1981. The two women poring over the yearbook with me are the only people I still have regular contact with who knew me and my parents well during my teen years.  From our first meeting, we three shared the bond of being only children and formed a kind of sisterhood. Now, we scrutinize pictures of the concert band, in which we all played the flute; the Top Hatters precision dance team with us kicking our black, fishnet-stockinged legs high; the Foreign Language Club (I studied French; Julie and Cathy took Spanish); and the 219 portrait photos of each of us in the graduating class.


 Tucked inside a manila envelope in my yearbook are four yellowed strips of newsprint, clippings of “Let’s Talk It Over,” the column I wrote for the school newspaper. The byline lists my former name (Stacey Northcote—that’s a story for another time). A couple columns reflect the Midwest values I grew up with—patriotism, school spirit, community. 

I’m surprised by the column published a week after the first Earth Day in 1970.  I have no recollection of being aware of that event or of the research I obviously did to be able to quote an article in the April 19, 1970 Chicago Sun Times:

Not a river or stream in Illinois is safe for swimming.

It will cost $6 billion by 1980 to clean up the state’s   waterways.

I’m surprised by the prophetic warnings I quoted from Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb:

It may be too late, no matter what we do, because we’ve already added so many poisons to the ecological systems of the planet.

We may, for instance, have already started changes in climate which will destroy so much of our food-growing ability that we may be inevitably on a downhill trend that cannot be reversed—at least not until a terrible cataclysm takes place.

I’m surprised that as a high school junior I used (at least sometimes) my writing to raise awareness about social issues.

Most of all, I’m surprised to discover that writing really has been a throughline for me. Russian actor and theater director Constantin Stanislavski coined the term in the 1930s to help actors explore the central impulse or desire that connects all of a character’s individual motivations and objectives together. The term also is used to describe a theme or thread that runs through the plot of a film or other dramatic or literary work.

As my two friends and I continue to turn the pages, I come across a photo of me with other members of Quill and Scroll (international honorary society for high school journalists).  I remember the profile I wrote for the school newspaper of a classmate who collected antiques (a foreshadowing of my book, Hands at Work?). Memories of the newspaper I helped produce at Vincennes University journalism camp the summer before my senior year re-surface, too. More evidence of this thread of writing running through my life.

Throughlines.  I suspect we all have one, whether we know it or not. For so many years I believed that nursing was the single thread that connected all of my actions, but perhaps, unlike novels and plays, we can have more than one. Although I’ve identified myself as a writer for only the past fifteen years, these musty newspaper clippings, the yellowing yearbook pages, and high school chums remind me that the writing throughline reaches back to a much earlier time in my life.

What is the throughline in your life?  Is there more than one thread that connects all of your drives and aspirations?

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

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 workshopI 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

Sunday, June 30, 2013

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.

Friday, June 28, 2013

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.

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

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?