Local writers celebrate the holiday season!

http://www.penbaypilot.com/article/john-maguire-holiday-reading-camden/26206

Time to get back to work, Writers! Pay in full by 12/27 and save $25.00.

The New Year is around the corner. Time to fulfill that resolution to write by signing up for my first class of 2014!

A terrific writer talks about her process via an interview on Goodreads

http://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/912.Ruth_Ozeki?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=2013-12&utm_content=ozeki

Local writer, Emily Randolph, published in this week's installment of "Transformations" on PenBay Pilot

http://www.penbaypilot.com/article/emily-randolph-broom-whisk-and-list/25009

Interview with author Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt is the author of three novels, her most recent, The Goldfinch, has been named the best book of the year by Amazon. I'm listening to it and will read it as well.

Spectacular. We can learn a lot by listening to her talk and reading her work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmZ_92v9D_E

December Class begins next week. Only one space left!

More great advice from Stephen Pressfield, this about making money as a writer.

http://www.stevenpressfield.com/2013/11/developing-multiple-revenue-streams/

Urban Poetry in Paris

http://www.mylittle.fr/mylittleparis/en/antoine-public-writer.html

"Paradise Lost" as a Career Guide

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20131119122627-1940438--paradise-lost-how-an-epic-poem-about-heaven-can-be-a-career-guide

December Classes begin soon. Sign up now!

Here's a great article on the language in The Gettysburg Address

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/lincolns-sound-bite-have-faith-in-democracy/?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0

Coming Soon to Our Shores? Ha!

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2013/11/14/arts/television/20121114WRITERS.html?_r=1&

PenBay Pilot's "Transformations" series honors our Veterans with this thoughtful poem.

http://www.penbaypilot.com/article/laura-bonazzoli-spelling-lesson/23646

Another fine writer published in PenBay Pilot's "Transformations" feature

http://www.penbaypilot.com/article/sybil-masquelier-two-poems-losing-all-nouns-and-migraineur/23175

PenBay Pilot publishes local poet, Franziska Hart, in "Transformations" feature

http://www.penbaypilot.com/article/franziska-hart-last-ironing/22879

Tuesday Evening Class is Filling Up Fast!

These dark, cold months offer perfect moments for writing.  Join us as we explore the Four Voices.

Give us what you've got!

Did you, as part of your New Year’s Resolution, decide to pick up the pen (or the mouse) once again and rewrite that screenplay, begin the novel or write the article you have always dreamed of writing? 

These dark months, from Samhain (Halloween) through the Spring equinox offer perfect moments for writing. Carpe Diem. Stay up late (I know, radical for Maine) and watch the moon and big dipper move across the sky or get up early, earlier than usual, and dedicate thirty minutes to expressing yourself. 

 “Creative work is…a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.” Steven Pressfield in The War of Art.

Tuesday Evening Class Added to the Fall Schedule!

Two New Classes Beginning Soon!

One Spot Left!!!

A New Fall Class is Starting Soon!

The Writer's Way to Approach Life's Twists and Turns

Ode to Melanie

When we lose our animals, it's so comforting to write about them as a way of remembering and honoring them!

This is not a traditional ode, but I am raising a glass, figuratively, as a toast to our beloved cat Melanie who passed away six weeks ago after a long and fruitful life. We think she lived eighteen years. May she live with ease, wherever she is.


One early Santa Monica morning, Irene, our enterprising housekeeper and nanny arrived with a tiny ball of gray fur, covered in gum and dirt. Yuk! My son Alex and I said no, but Irene, in her infinite wisdom, insisted we spend a day with Melanie. No other choice in any case because Irene would be with us all day. By 4 o’clock, when she was meant to leave, Alex had decided to keep the cat. And we agreed to call her Melanie II, Melanie the first having passed away several years back. And I agreed to take her to vet and get her cleaned up. Mellie had a mind of her own – what cat does not? She soon began to walk out the door and down the steps of our condo. We would spy her in the sun on top of a nearby shed, in the garden across the alley, creeping on her belly chasing a butterfly or a mouse. She’d leap in the air and bat it down, and, if she were successful, she would, of course, bring home her trophy to us, dropping it at our feet, like an offering to a prince (for, of course, she’d bring it to Alex, not me).

Good thing though – when we called her at the end of the day, she would come home to eat and stay inside, often sitting on the wall of our terrace watching the world go by, whipping her tail into a frenzy if she saw another cat. Dogs did not seem to bother her. When we adopted a seven-year-old white and taffy colored Cumberland Collie, Mellie trained him. Charlie allowed Mellie to sleep within the curve of his belly when he slept on our coach. Whatever was amiss in our world, was immediately put aright when Alex and I walked into the house and saw Mellie
molded into Cody’s belly. I’d put my arm around Alex and grin. As I write this a line from Robert Frost’s poem comes floating back to me “Earth is the right place for love.”
   
When Charlie was very sick, I rented an oxygen tank and brought him home form the vet for a final night so Mellie (and we) could say goodbye.  We explained to Mellie what was happening. I swear she understood, moving closer to Charlie and licking him and then curling up around the oxygen tank for one more nap with him.

We assumed that we would wait a long time before getting another dog, but fate would have it that a little one who looked just like Charlie was up for adoption. It took 30 seconds to decide – Alex and I reading each other’s expression across the cage where Cody paced—shook our heads yes and brought Cody home. Mellie was not so kind to Cody. Maybe she missed Charlie and didn’t want a replacement. Maybe it was his behavior, which became so disruptive that I chose to take him to a renowned dog expert/psychic in Manhattan Beach. At her request, I went off for an hour and when I returned, Cody was calmed down. The psychic told me many things about my life that she learned from putting herself in Cody’s body. We lived one floor up, I drove in under out apartment, my son was about ten and had kind eyes. I was bowled over and relieved. So was Millie. Cody settled in, lost his hostile edge. Many an evening Alex and I walked Cody as Mellie followed us, leaping from yard to yard as we walked by, appearing every so often on the sidewalk to check in and then disappearing again. When the Northridge Earthquake struck in 1994, Melanie disappeared for days. We never found out where she went, but we were overjoyed to see her return.
   
Melanie has had so many lives and lived in many places. When I moved back to the East Coast after Alex went off to prep school in Boston, Melanie flew in to Providence with my friend Monica and stayed with me and Cody at my dad’s until my house was ready. First one house and then another in Newport. The second house was where we lived when my father was in the stages of dying at the ripe age of 97 ½. Sometimes I would break down and start to sob, sitting in my comfortable chair on the top floor of the house.  Almost immediately, I would hear a commotion on the stairs. Melanie and Cody would come whipping around the corner and come to me, Mellie leaping to my lap and Cody nudging me.  They knew I was hurting and were there to comfort me. When my father passed away, Mellie crawled under the covers with me and Cody slept in the curve of my legs. Animals are sentient beings.

And then we moved to the wilds of Morrill, Maine. Mellie traveling with Alex in his car, Cody with me in mine. The animals were thrilled. There were acres at their disposal, horses, deer, chipmunks, squirrels (Cody’s favorite). Mellie watched the birds from inside the house and from the edge of the forest. We figured it was her television. Even though she spent hours outside, she was clever enough to avoid coyotes, eagles and fishers. Winter – Cody loved it if we cleaned his paws and built him tunnels in the snow. Melanie would travel the tunnels after us. My bedroom was  freezing cold. I slept with a hat on my head, dog on my feet, Melanie under the covers wrapped in my arms.

The house was good sized. I lived alone, worked downstairs in my office which Mellie guarded from all intruders, like Cody. She would sit on the stairs to my office, and wouldn’t let Cody pass.  If he tried to go by her, she hissed.

When I had to move to Belfast, my animals came with me, but not for long. Cody became deaf and then blind. We had to put him down. And, a wonderful woman, Mallery Dalto, adopted Mellie who was very happy in her new Belfast home. When she passed away peacefully, I called Irene and Alex to tell them Melanie had gone. We laughed and told stories about Mellie and Cody.

This is my thank you note to our animals. They amused us, comforted us, taught us about love and gave us great joy. May they live with ease wherever they are.

A New Writing Class Begins in July. Three Spots Left!

John Newburn: A Day in July

A terrific piece by John Newburn, and the latest in a series of students' work that is being published on the PenBay Pilot.

http://www.penbaypilot.com/article/john-newburn-day-july/15055

A Quote From Audrey Hepburn

For This Past Week, A Poem By Mary Oliver

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

~ Mary Oliver ~

Please "like" my Facebook Page, Kathrin Seitz Consulting
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Kathrin-Seitz-Consulting/156904007688760

A Poet Friend Shared An Appropriate Poem About Boston

When I asked a poet friend of mine to send an appropriate poem for this Boston
Marathon tragedy week, she sent this. A poem she read and shared after 9/11.
It speaks to all of us.










Musee des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.


In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.    

Write While Living Your Life

“The problem is, too many writers today are afraid to be still.”

So says Silas House, the author of four novels, several plays and a creative non-fiction book. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/the-art-of-being-still/ Writing in the Opinionator column of The New York Times, House maintains that many of us writers talk about writing, attend conferences, write and cartoon on FB, rather than write.

How do we write as we lead our busy lives? We learn to be still in our heads or House says “to achieve the sort of stillness that allows our senses to become heightened.” Or, as House says quoting Joyce Dyer “seeing like an animal.”

As a writer, when I am stuck in a line at Rite Aid, I challenge myself to come up with the color of the scarf on the lady in front of me, sky blue, the color of the ocean as a thunder storm comes on, the blue of Paul Newman’s eyes? Or is it periwinkle? Turquoise? I am still in my mind. And, serendipitously, I am not writhing with impatience as the line crawls along.

I remember waiting, more than once, for a cross-town bus on 67th and Lexington in New York City. All the other passengers were stepping forward, looking left for the bus, and then returning to the standing position – when is that bus going to arrive? Instead of copying this native practice, I would switch into my writer’s mind and decided to create an image/moment (as Jack Grapes would call it), in my mind. How would I describe The Armory in front of me? What is the light and what are the sounds of this moment. Smells? The costume on the others around me? And their characteristics? I do not write this down. I’m keeping still and engaging in an exercise that keeps me alive as a writer.

I invite all of you to do this. Transform washing the dishes into a writing exercise. How would your main character behave in this exact moment? While driving to the market, who do you see along the way? How are they dressed? What can you tell about these characters by the way they move?

Silas House reiterates all of this, and in a more specific way, in his piece.  HYPERLINK "http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/the-art-of-being-still/" Check it out.

House concludes, the age-old truth that we all know somewhere inside of us:  “There is no way to learn how to do this except by simply doing it. We must use every moment we can to think about the piece of writing at hand, to see the world through the point of view of our characters, to learn everything we can that serves the writing….It must be the way we live our lives.”

Exercise: Listen to the rhythm and tone of people talking in elevators, at the table next to you in a café. At the dinner table. Overhear stories. Listen to accents and new words. Every time you hear a new word, look it up, put it in a sentence. And, if in a café, bring out the journal and start writing down what you hear. And, if you are working on a character, imagine him with you at your table. What would he say about that strange looking bum in the corner?

This exercise has as many possibilities as there are moments in our day.

Connect With Your Inner Voice

June is a perfect time to begin a relationship to your inner writer. There are five spots left. Register early and get the discount!

Stealing Like an Artist

So, here’s what happens when you steal like an artist.

Check this out. A 34-year-old Brooklyn artist, Adam Parker Smith “meticulously stole” from 77 artists, “sketchbooks, video, architectural objects, art making devices and more.” These pieces were taken from his favorite artist friends in order to put together a show of their work, called “Thanks.” The artists targeted knew nothing about the show until a couple of weeks before it opened. Many of the artists consigned their works to the gallery so they would get the proceeds of the sale of their work. The gallery owner, Lauren Scott Miller, said she thought of Parker Smith as both curator and conceptual artist: “He’s very thoughtful about each acquisition.” Most of the artists whose work was lifted were amused. “Any difficulty I had that he had breached a trust was overwhelmed by the humor I found in the overall project.” Parker Smith said, “This project has this gimmick that I’m stealing from everybody but it’s really about community.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/arts/design/adam-parker-smiths-thanks-at-lu-magnus-gallery.html

So what does this have to do with writers? Austin Kleon encourages us to steal from our favorite authors, to discover our cultural antecedents and to honor them. In the wonderful, A Different Sun by Elaine Neil Orr, the author acknowledges this debt in the introductory pages of the novel: “I sing praises to my muses.” And then she lists the authors whose work she admires.

Exercise (stolen from my own blog)

Identify an author you admire. Take a couple of pages of her work and break it down. Read it aloud. How does she create sentences? Pronoun the verb—in that order or another? Does she repeat? Is her writing full of metaphor? If so, how does she pull the metaphors onto the page? And then read it aloud again. And again. Print out the magnifying glass and go into the minute details of the workings of this machine. Start a journal entry and, one page in, begin to imitate or “steal from” your designated author. Write in the same rhythm and choose a similar structure to the sentences. Write for three pages. And then go back to your own voice. What have you learned? Read your piece aloud.

A Quote From a Friend

 This quote came to me from a friend who read my latest blog. Isn't it terrific?

" In many shamanic societies if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, the would ask one of four questions.

When did you stop dancing?

When did you stop singing?

When did you stop being enchanted by stories?

When did you stop finding comfort in the sweet territory of silence?

Where we have stopped dancing, singing, being enchanted by stories, or finding comfort in silence is where we have experienced the loss of soul.

Dancing, singing, storytelling, and silence are the four universal healing salves.”

Rituals

    About eight years ago, I was rewriting my novel, working on a scene thats deals with the losses my heroine suffered in her early twenties. The more I wrote, the more my character’s feelings swamped me. When I finished work for the day, I couldn’t seem to separate from her misery.  It was as though I had shape shifted and didn’t know how to come back. I asked my writer friend Vici, who is in her own right a shape shifter and shaman, to talk to me about rituals sfor getting in and getting out of writing, unscathed.

    I had thought I had invented the shape shifting metaphor for writing, but Vici assured me that I had tapped into a mythic concept, which is common to all ancient tribal cultures and all creative people. Shape shifting, it turns out, is something we writers do all the time.  We dwell, as Vici said, “in the realms of the betwixt and between, becoming other people genders, animals, even species; we travel through time and space; we speak in tongues not our own.”  Doesn’t this sound familiar? And we can use rituals to open and close the doors between our worlds. Just as other shape shifters do.

    Vici cautioned that to be successful, we writers must use rituals that allow the gates to open and shut, safely.  We do not want to allow unwanted or uninvited energies to “cross the threshold” with us.  If you practice a religion, you might want to use a set of rituals from this belief system. If you are not bound to any tribe or set of beliefs, you are, of course, free to choose rituals that work for you. But, Vici continues, “The only requirement is that the ritual speaks to our own imagination, powerfully enough to clarify our intentions and strengthen our will.” Further, quoting Starhawk, she reminded me, ritual “is a patterned movement of energy designed to accomplish a purpose.” Our purpose might be, as mine was, to keep my characters on the page and out of my life, or, as my intention is every day, to keep my butt in the chair and to prevent myself from running, screaming, from the room. Whatever it is, rituals can become our greatest ally as we shape shift.

    Remember the scene, I think it was in Shakespeare in Love, when Will tossed salt over his shoulder before he sat down to write? Steven Pressfield in The War of Art, talks about his elaborate and very effective ritual.  He argues that if we consciously invoke what he calls “the muse,” through ritual, and respectfully obey her maxim to write, we will be successful. His success proves the wisdom of this advice.

Exercise: Write in your journal, describing the rituals that have informed your life, whether they are based on your religion, your love of Greek myths, hip-hop. video games or sports. You will discover that you have had many in your life. Now look at your present day life. Which rituals remain? Write about those. Now imagine all of these stirring in a pot; reduce the heat and take the essence of all of them to create your own writing ritual. Reread Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art and check out his ritual. It is in the first chapter titled “What I Do.” It will inspire you!

"Don't Wait Until You Know Who You Are to Get Started"

  -->

“Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started.”

            Austin Kleon in Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative.”( Workman, 2012.)

Steal Like An Artist is a book to keep close by you as you work.  Kelon’s first point among the ten is  “Steal Like An Artist.” He quotes from artists of all sorts. For example, Kobe Bryant, the basketball star, says, “There isn’t a good move that isn’t an old move.”  Bryant says that all his moves were copied from his heroes—he watched tapes of them until his could do what they did, but he had to adopt what he learned to his own body. So, it might be Michael Jordan as channeled by Kobe Bryant.

Kleon encourages us to bow toward and imitate our cultural ancestors until we have combined all of them into our own rich mixture.  “Nobody is born with a style or a voice. In the beginning we learn by pretending to be our heroes.”

 Yoko Ono says, “Start copying what you love. Copy. Copy. Copy. Copy. At the end of the copy you will find yourself.” Daunting on the one hand, but straightforward on the other. Pick someone you respect and copy.

Last summer I invited my students to copy, copy, copy the writer they most admired. The voices of Eudora Welty, Rainer Maria Rilke and Ernest Hemingway, channeled by my students, filled the room. How did the students accomplish this? They studied the machinery of each writer, examining the structure of the language, the voice, the inner workings of each sentence. Like taking a clock apart and putting it back together. My students learned a lot and the writing improved. And they got to spend a bunch of time with their heroes.

You too can do this. You just have to let go of your resistance to “stealing” and put on your analytic hat. Answer that question – how did he do it?

Exercise: Identify an author you admire. Take a couple of pages of her work and break it down. Read it aloud. How does she create sentences? Pronoun then verb—in that order or another? Does she repeat? Is her writing full of metaphor? If so, how does she pull the metaphors onto the page? And then read it aloud again. And again.

Print out the magnifying glass and go into the minute details of the workings of this machine.

Start a journal entry and, one page in, begin to imitate or “steal from” your designated author. Write in the same rhythm and choose a similar structure to the sentences. Write for three pages. And then go back to your own voice. What have you learned? Read your piece aloud.

Reflect Upon Your Present Blessings

-->

Reflect upon your present blessings, of which

every man has plenty;

not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.

Charles Dickens

It’s a good idea as a writer to step back from your narrative, dialogue, description and make a comment about life.  We all long for wisdom – we want to be set right or awakened or turned up side down, if only for a moment, and we are happy to find tidbits of wisdom tossed into a work of fiction.  Let’s take a tip or two from the Greeks:

The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.

Sophocles Oedipus Rex

We know this, don’t we, but isn’t it helpful to be reminded of in the middle of an extraordinary play!  This thought becomes part of our take-away from the evening, consciously or unconsciously.

Unwanted favors gain no gratitude.

Oedipus at Colonus.

How often do we imagine we are helping someone when in fact we are just bothering them?  I call this part of me Lady Bountiful, the part of me that gets thrills from playing the helpful benefactor, often, it turns out, to people who are not interested in my help. Sophocles, yes Sophocles, can jolt me to awareness about this.

Philosophy tossed into the middle of the narrative stops the reader and gives us pause.  Abraham Verghese, in his novel Cutting for Stone, offers this thought:

It was a sacred object.  But for a four-year old, everything is sacred and ordinary.

We stop to think, is this true for me?  Does the child in me treat everything as sacred? Should I?

Commenting on his wife’s remark, late in life, that she hates him, the narrator of John Updike’s  My Father’s Tears, says this: 

As well as love one another, we hate one another and even ourselves.

I read this and stop and think. I suddenly feel melancholic, hating to think this might be true of all marriages, of all relationships. The narrator has snagged my attention and won’t let go.

Hope is the deep orientation of the human soul that can be held at the darkest times.

Vaclav Havel

Havel knows what he is talking about, having been involved in the Polish fight for freedom.

Exercise: Take a look at your work.  Do you stop to impart wisdom from time to time?  Choose a piece you are writing, or simply begin a piece in your journal.  Half way through, stop and ask yourself, what am I trying to say here?  What can I say to stop my reader short, to make her pause and reflect?

When I...

The other night, I saw Robert Pinsky  (poet laureate of the United States, 1997 -2000) talk about poetry on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer.  Charming, engaging and passionate, he talked most particularly of his love of music and the importance of rhyme and tonality in poetry. As well, we saw a clip of Pinsky reading his poems with a live jazz band – his voice like another instrument riffing right along with the clarinet and the saxophone.  Pinsky says “I think the rhythms in a lot of my writing are an attempt to create that feeling of a beautiful, gorgeous jazz solo that gives you more emotion and some more and coming around with some more, and it’s the same but it’s changed, and the rhythm is very powerful, but it is also lyricism. I think I’ve been trying to create something like that in my writing for a long time.” (The Progressive)

"Samurai Song" by Robert Pinsky When I had no roof I made Audacity my roof. When I had No supper my eyes dined. When I had no eyes I listened. When I had no ears I thought. When I had no thought I waited. When I had no father I made Care my father. When I had No mother I embraced order. When I had no friend I made Quiet my friend. When I had no Enemy I opposed my body. When I had no temple I made My voice my temple. I have No priest, my tongue is my choir. When I have no means fortune Is my means. When I have Nothing, death will be my fortune. Need is my tactic, detachment Is my strategy. When I had No lover I courted my sleep. Watch Pinsky recite this poem

I hear the music in Pinsky’s work. Notice Pinsky’s repetition of  “When I” at the beginning of each paragraph.  Read the poem aloud and you will see that this powerful and lyrical language, this repetition pulls you into the poem.  It’s what Jack Grapes calls “a sung verse… public voice, meant to rouse and inspire.” Mary Oliver uses the same voice in How Would You Live Then? --repeating “What if” and achieving a similar reaction in the listener. Read the poem aloud and you will feel the effects of the rhythm of repetition of What if.”

How would you live then?

 What if a hundred rose-breasted grosbeaks

     flew in circles around your head? 

What if the mockingbird came into the house with you and

     became your advisor? 

What if the bees filled your walls with honey and all

     you needed to do was ask them and they would fill

    the bowl? 

What if the brook slid downhill just

     past your bedroom window so you could listen

    to its slow prayers as you fell asleep? 

What if you painted a picture of a tree, and the leaves

     began to rustle, and a bird cheerfully sang

     from its painted branches? 

What if you suddenly saw that the silver of water was brighter than the silver

     of money? 

What if you finally saw that the sunflowers, turning toward the sun all day

     and every day --- who knows how, but they do it ---were

   more precious, more meaningful than gold?

Exercise:  Repeating the phrase  "When I "' or “What if” build a series of sentences that, due to the repetition of “When I” or “What if," become an incantation.  Vary the length of the sentences.  For example, "When I think of gin, I grin.  When I think of gin and grin, I reach for the bottle.”   Or, “What if I wrote the poem that’s been living in me all these years.  What if it got published? What if I had to go the publishing party and I had no dress.  What if I went naked” Of course, I’m am trying to be funny to lighten the burden here, but this is serious and valuable stuff.

Think of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. He repeats the phrase many times, varying the length of the sentences.  You can go serious with your tone, like Oliver and King, or be lighthearted, talking about chocolate ice cream for example. It's the exercise that counts. It's the rhythm and tone of your writing that will be the incantation. 

Throw Your Dream into Space Like a Kite

Throw your dream into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back: a new life, a new friend, a new love, or a new country. Anais Nin

When you wake up you gotta show the love in your heart. Carol King.

It’s the start of a New Year. We need to be awake to all the world has to offer us as artists. The Anais Nin quote came to me as I tilled the field of New Year’s Resolutions. The Carole King line floated across the TV screen. I learn once again that each moment offers a fruit ripe for the picking.

One of King’s backup musicians, Danny "Kootch" Kortchmar – acoustic guitar, conga, electric guitar, vocals reminds us that we are here “to serve the song.” Writers have to serve the story. Hence those long hours over a paragraph. What does this piece want to say? And, as one of the musicians says, “We are here to get people to feel.” How do we best do that, we ask, as we agonize over the appropriate word for the blue of our protagonist’s eyes. Are they azure, beryl, or blue-gray. Blue-green or cerulean, cobalt, or indigo?

As the year turns, I bow in the direction of my spiritual antecedents. I recite Mary Oliver and W.S. Merwin and the Pslams to ground myself in the world that surrounds me. I love this moment in Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese:

                   Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --

over and over announcing your place

                           in the family of things.

By our words, we help ourselves and our readers to find our place in the family of things.