Winter Writing Class Schedule.

 

Click on the image to see larger version - Thanks, Kathrin

Writing and the Dark Months

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. “ Henry David Thoreau

Today is the Winter Solstice. The shortest day of the year. A time when the sun appears at the lowest point in the sky and seems not to move for several days before and after the Solstice. Following the Winter Solstice, the days grow longer and the nights shorter.

Ancient Mother Earth, “our oldest ancestor, “ now rests. At the harvest and All Hallow’s Eve, she has born new life to sustain life. Now, at the Solstice, she is renewing, and dreaming and, "if we mirror her cycles, it is time for us to quiet our lives and dedicate some time for our renewal, for reverie."(Jean Forest in Inner Tapestry, 2003) This is the perfect time for writers to go inward. To renew the Deep Voice and to dig down and harvest the words we have longed to share.

As Joan Borysenko says, in Pocketful of Miracles, “The Seasonal rhythms correlate with our own body rhythms…. Our dream life and inner life grow more insistent in the winter darkness…. The old year is put to bed, one’s business is finished, and the harvest of spiritual maturity is reaped as wisdom and forgiveness.”

Exercise:
Sit back, and give into the darkness of the season.
Light a candle and study its glow. When you feel transformed, begin a piece, without forethought or plan. Write like you talk, as Method Writing would call it. Write for ten minutes without stopping. As you write, hear the darkness and quiet around you. Take it in. Put it into words.

Schedule for my upcoming course focused on accessing "The Deep Voice"

Wild Geese

 

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
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.

from Dream Work by Mary Oliver
published by Atlantic Monthly Press
© Mary Oliver

The sound of wild geese squawking and barking wakes me these days. Depending on my mood and the time of day, I am raised up or saddened by the sound that signals their departure. Autumn. Fall. Falling back. The loss of daylight hours. It’s the only time of the year when I feel a sense of wistfulness, an acute awareness of the passage of time. And it seems to be the central theme of every poem written about autumn. Yet, I don’t want to stay with this feeling. I prefer Mary Oliver’s response to the wild geese. “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination.”

Exercise: Spend a moment outside taking in the autumn air, listening to the sounds of the world around you. While outside, read aloud Mary Oliver’s poem and listen to the repetition of the sounds that begin with “meanwhile” and roll on and on. Jack Grapes calls this voice the “To Be Read and Sung” voice. “The voice Greek and Roman orators....the voice of the Old Testament and the Deep South; the voice that speaks to the multitudes, a voice that is meant to rouse and inspire.” Write your own prose poem about autumn using the repetition and rhythm in the Mary Oliver poem. Speak to the Multitudes. Offer your imagination to the world!!

Cultivate your garden

Maine Lupines - Patricia Shea

When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands. Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Man the Reformer,” a lecture read before the Mechanics Apprentices’ Library Association, Boston, January 25, 1841.)

This morning, I walked out into the newly planted garden at our newly rehabbed house in Rockport, Maine, and paused, spying a squirrel, yawing mouth full of nut, who was going from plant to plant in search of the perfect home for his chestnut. Ahh, I thought he’s squirreling away something, creating a stash for the winter. Pulled into the squirrel’s world, I abandoned, for a moment, my concerns about the falling-apart world around us: hoards of starving people; over-population; ice caps melting; polar bears dying; environmental disasters; wildly gyrating stock markets; massive unemployment; the NBA lockout; the Greeks! The national debt! Ruthless dictators! A polarized society; a deadlocked Congress! Is it a function of age that I am more concerned--my sense of mortality causing me to ponder the world I will leave behind? Rather than going inside and saying the Metta Prayer 21 times (I’d done that already), I stayed my attention on the squirrel and my garden. How soothing it was to be among the flowers; to inhale their fragrance; to wonder at the bees; to observe the ways of the squirrels. As I quieted my mind, the last line of Candide floated
into my consciousness and (after silently offering thanks to my parents for my excellent liberal arts education), I smiled. Voltaire, speaking as Candide, whispered, “We must cultivate our garden.” Or, let’s abandon the cares of the world and turn our attention to what is before us. The final words of wisdom, the final line of the book, from a man who has seen many continents, much calamity and gnashing of teeth, has found and lost love, friends, gold, and returned home to buy a farm, live in community and begin a pastoral existence.

How like writing this is – cultivating our own words, sowing each word in a line on a page, shutting out, for a moment, the cares of the world. And how much more satisfying this farming of words is than paying attention to the world’s woes. Many authors have been gardeners. May Sarton, the American poet and novelist who lived in New England in her youth, as well as in her final years, says, “Gardening gives me back a sense of proportion about everything.” And Walt Whitman, “Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.” Listen to how poetic Nathaniel Hawthorne sounds when talking about his garden at the The Old Manse, his residence on the banks of the Concord River, “ I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a row of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.” I think of the expression “It’s nothing but a hill of beans” and marvel how a writer can change an ordinary bean into a line of poetry.

So, writers, I propose you cultivate your gardens, whatever form that might take.
Exercise: Choose five verbs, five nouns, five adjectives, five adverbs* from the
world of gardening, and create a short poem out of them.

Here’s a possible list:

Verbs: Cultivate, water, plant, nourish, turn over, mulch, splash, sprinkle, feed,
dig, hybridize, fertilize, focus, place, sow.

Nouns: Perennial, squash, seed, root, stem, juniper, sunflower, sweet pea, earth, soil, clay, rosemary.

Adjectives: Ochre, sweet, fragrant, lavender, spicy, woodsy, buttery, orchid-pink, juicy, crisp, wild.

Adverbs: Mindfully, carefully, artfully, gingerly, sequentially, playfully, seasonally, gently, deeply, naturally.

*I know I usually rant and rave about the use of adverbs, but they have their place and it’s fun to sprinkle them sparingly among the rows of words. (Yes, and that sentence has two adverbs!!)

Patricia Shea

When I......

Storm clouds gathering over Maine

"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

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)

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 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 light-hearted, 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

And so the storm passes.

LOST

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you

Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here.

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger.

Must ask permission to know and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,

I have made this place around you.

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows

Where you are. You must let it find you.

David Wagoner, copyright 1976

Path through the trees   Patricia Shea

To me, this poem is about artistic process, whether writing, acting, sculpting, or painting. To get in touch with our deep artist’s voice, we must stand still and open ourselves to receive. “Stand still…The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you.” As terrifying as it may seem, we must be willing to allow ourselves to lose control and get out of the way. The creative process is mysterious, and, if we’re not careful our grown-up inhibitions will block our genius. Pablo Picasso said, “When I was a child, I could paint like a master, and I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to paint like a child.”

Before you begin your work, create a sacred space around you. Whether it’s throwing salt over your shoulder, as Shakespeare did, or praying to Homer, as Stephen Pressfield does (see The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield ), acknowledge, consciously, that you are beginning the task. In other words, ask permission to know and be known. By our words; by our characters; by our story. And then let the forest - the work - find us.

Exercise. Sit still, at your computer, or with your notebook open in front of you. Complete your ritual: ring the bell, light the candle, toss salt over your shoulder, put your Red Sox hat on your head. Shift into a state of hyper-awareness. Ask for the visitation of the powerful stranger. Empty your mind. Let the words find you.

And, check out Chris Guillebeau’s Manifesto for writers.

It should get your blood boiling!