A Poetic Experience

Two weeks ago, I took a lovely two-day workshop with Kim Stafford, a poet and teacher at Lewis & Clark College. The course was offered for credit and was full of graduate students in counseling and education, not the usual suspects at a writing workshop. Their thoughtful responses to Kim’s prompts and suggestions turned my own writing and reflection in a whole different direction.

I write poetry only occasionally—as a gift for my friend Amy, say, when she turned 50 or as a thank-you to my friend Diane for the use of her beach house. But there in the presence of Kim’s poems, and those of his father, William Stafford, I found myself inspired to think about emotional and spiritual reality in more lyrical terms than the kinds of journal writing I do.

My memoir (Sober Truths: The Making of an Honest Woman) was my first real foray into turning my past into something creatively imagined and executed. Working with Kim, I found odd bits of memory coming to the fore, asking to be played with. And so I did. Here are a couple of my efforts:

The Tenth Moon

On a windiest night, Charles and I stood in the middle of Pearl Street. We had eaten. We had not yet explored each other’s skin.

The indigo velvet of early October cradled us. Rushing clouds veiled the moon, then parted for the passage of six Canadian Geese.

We stood arms around each other, our nervousness set aside in the hallowed clamor.

The moonlight followed them, then followed us as we migrated up the dusty stairs to the brown corduroy bedspread.

We did not take flight, Charles and I. Never seen again. But tonight the voices call South, and South again, and I do.

Sorrow revisited

Now I remember the fat man in his flowered yard, the cane he leaned on, the finger he beckoned with. His eyes were lost in the flesh of his face, and they never looked right at me. The candy he offered me stuck to the damp of his hand.

And now I remember his wet lips on my cheek, the claw of his hand on my upper arm, wrenching free, heart pounding, running home . My mother’s fear turned to fury at me, when I believed I’d escaped.

I remember too, years later, the glow of the Christmas lights, the toddler’s tuneless crooning, the room awash in laughter and white elephants.

Listen up, stars – My mother, old now, eyes distant, voice matter of fact. Her father’s typesetter pushing her up against the wall, his beard rough on her chin, the candy to buy silence. I hold her hand and say nothing.

Working with prompts to begin (or enhance) your fiction

When I was getting started as a writer, I came upon The Writer’s Book of Day by Judy Reeves. Besides being full of encouraging and helpful ideas, Reeves includes hundreds of prompt ideas, words and phrases to spark us to write. I decided to take on writing prompts as a daily practice and for the next 20 months, I wrote nearly every day. Even though a lot of the writing was marginal and some of it was downright awful, it made a huge difference in my writing: it loosened me up and helped me be more creative. I recommend it. Here are some ideas for using prompts.

1. Develop a daily practice. Set aside a brief writing time every day. Make it small (10 minutes was ideal for me) so that even if you forget until late in the day, you can still make time for it.
2. Use a timer. Write for your allotted minutes and stop, even mid-sentence, when the timer goes off. You can always continue with the story at another time.
3. Use prompts provided by a book, like the one by Judy Reeves, or a dictionary or phrases you hear in passing, or create your own. After I used up all of Reeves many ideas, I write a month’s worth of prompts on the first of each month. I did an alphabetical list of words that intrigued me. I did a list of objects in my apartment. I did phrases from poems by Mary Oliver. Anything will serve.
4. In the first sentence of each writing, use the prompt and the name of a fictional character. For example, using the prompt red tea cup, I might write this sentence: “Evelyn sat on the terrace, the red tea cup in her lap.” Then write a scene or brief story. Some months I used the same name for every prompt, beginning to develop a relationship with that character.
5. I wrote the prompts by hand in Clairefontaine notebooks (I love that paper!). I found it easier to get fictional somehow when I wasn’t at the computer, where I work all day as an editor. However, you do it, keep the writings. You never know what might come of it.

Writing as a spiritual and political act

For the last few years or so, I’ve been living from a stronger sense of mission. Or perhaps it’s easier to say that I’ve become conscious of my mission in life, or one of them anyway. Uncovering and developing my creative self, both as painter and writer, have been really critical pieces to my recovery from alcoholism. And they have contributed immeasurably to a different and healthier sense of self. But I’ve also come to see that writing and painting and collaging and knitting and gardening and cooking and everything we do that is an expression of our creative selves is part of a force for good, maybe even Good with a capital G.

There is a tremendous amount of destructive energy afoot in our world. There’s the obvious: wars, so many of them; domestic violence; torture of those imprisoned; brutal treatment of animals, wild and domestic; not to mention the rape of the land through logging and overfishing and pollution. I could go on and on.

But I’ve come to believe that one small and powerful way to mitigate the effects of so much destructive energy is to ramp up our positive creative energies: to paint more often, to write more poetry, to dance and sing around the house. To arrange flowers with an eye to their color and beauty, to savor and record in the mind’s eye a blossom, the shine on a hummingbird’s throat, the spectacular rosiness of a Northwest winter sunrise. To make amends to a friend we’ve hurt, to write a letter to a teacher who encouraged us in our youth.

So next time you feel the urge to write a story or work on that screenplay, do it. It has a higher purpose.

Advice for writing a memoir

I was talking to my 20-year-old nephew Alex recently. He’d been to Disneyworld in Florida and had taken my memoir, Sober Truths: The Making of an Honest Woman, with him to read. We had an interesting conversation about it. He said that in the beginning, it was like reading about a stranger, someone’s childhood. But when I started talking about my young adult years, he could really relate. I asked him if I seemed the same person to him in the book as I am with him in person and he said yes. Somehow I was really pleased by that for I had not wanted to create a fictional persona for my memoir, but to be myself.

All of us have a story to tell. We don’t all need to publish them but our friends and families would love to read them. And writing down stories about our life experiences is a great gift to future generations, who will see what it was like to live when we did (differences) and that we all have the same things that make us happy and sad and angry (similarities).

Here are some ideas to get you started if you’re interested in writing some memoir pieces from your own life:
Find a supportive writing group and/or writing coach to help you with your process.
Make a list of 50-60 pivotal moments and experiences in your life.
Write these experiences as scenes with visual and sensory detail, dialog, and action.
Take those initial drafts and flesh them out into robust experiences for the reader. Remember readers don’t want to read about your experiences, they want to experience them with you.

The Importance of Telling Our Stories

The Importance of Telling Our Stories

Several months ago, I finally got around to that photograph project. You know the one where you take the boxes of old family photos and put them in order neatly in albums. I had fancy plans but ended up just getting them in, kind of any which way. In the process, I came upon a photo of my mother as a teenager that was unfamiliar to me. It’s a photo of six women. I recognized my mother and her two sisters and of course my grandmother, who looked impossibly young. The other two young women I didn’t know. There was nothing on the photo itself to tell me and, at this point, my mother and my aunts and my grandmother are all deceased. I realized I will never know if these were cousins or neighbors or friends.

And I thought about how many photos most of us have of family and friends and how few written documents. In my family, there are no written documents from my father’s side. My mother left a couple of small, cryptic diaries from the early years of her marriage and I have a few letters she sent me over the years, but there’s no one left to tell any of those stories about their growing up or my grandparents’ lives in their youth and middle years or ancestors before that.

All human beings are storytellers, but in our culture, where we used to tell each other stories (around the fire or kitchen table), we’ve become consumers of other people’s stories, mostly fictional (soap operas, movies, novels) and we don’t weave our own much anymore. I think this is why there is such an interest in memoirs of all kinds.