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.

Two Last Minute Openings for the Winter Writing Workshop!