sometimes I think I should return to the intention of writing the dreams. They are vivid and more active than my awake life. My awake life is full of distraction and longings and frustrations and disappointments and stress with a little pleasure thrown in with hanging out with friends or going to see a movie or finding an engaging moment on tv. My identity in my art has all but disappeared. I’m not writing, I’m not playing music. I’m too exhausted, too spent, running ragged at school in part because of trying to teach students who are eager but not always ready to learn more difficult skills. We have fabulous “extra” things going on at school and I bite off more than we can chew. I love the actual time in the classroom engaging with students and it feels like they are engaged and enjoying it and then the assessments are low performing for the majority as they revert back to old habits badly learned in middle school “to begin” and “to continue” as if these were transitions and it doesn’t matter how many times I beg them to think about what they write, they resort to these horrible habits of hollow writing. Alliteration intended. I even sat there yesterday and took a break and asked them to stand and stretch and write out some memory notes about forbidden words (and so forth) and then let them back into their essays for 20 minutes to clean up and edit. And the horrible habits of hollow writing remained. (Just one of many prevailing, distressing examples currently—refraining from mentioning those who have had me for a year and are stuck on not knowing what to do with a simple appeal to them so we are all struggling to figure it out—me how to instruct and show; them how to just go for it and see what happens.)
But my dreams are amazing and active and energetic and creative and often solve mysteries and problems and there are always many people and often there are people from my past who are present and we are working or playing together as if no time had passed and the believability is unbelievable when I awaken to sadly only partial memory. Last night involved many colored pencils and swapping out ideas and colors for a project I can’t remember (the one at school is the Happy Thanksgiving banner for families receiving Elev8hope baskets—which I am part of but won’t be coloring or drawing...) And all of this was exchanged with a “best” friend in high school and college with whom we had a bit of a painful and misunderstanding-laden separation in our 20s. But no memory or trace of that was in the dream, we were simply the selves we have always been with me wanting to create and she needing to go out and be medical help for others, though she always had the cool stuff to create with.
The dream included a funky place on the beach with several stair cases and secret entrances and that old wood worn by wind and rain and yet not rotting and paint peeling patiently and rustically and at one point suddenly all we who were living and working there and in and out all the time came up to the door and it was locked! So was the second door! We each had been given a key but these keys were hidden safely in our luggage because we also heard the scuttlebutt that people were always in and out and so much going on there was no need for a key or to lock the door but suddenly we were locked out. I remembered an entrance slightly beyond and above a second entrance and it was something like an attic entrance so I climbed those stairs that narrowed and found the little door and it was bowed just a little bit and there was barely any light, just that which trickled up with me from the landing twisted below and I could pull up the corner of the door just enough to see a little paper bag with its sides rolled down and brass keys brightly shining in a pile like the treasures of old caves that possessed their own light and shone out even from the darkest caves and smiling I took one and came down stairs and handed it to the thin and scruffy guy who was the first to discover the locked entry door; he tried it and it opened and I was a hero glimmering in his smiling eyes. We all cheered and went in and I secretly took the key back to its little hidden bag.
Other scenes in this same dream included sitting on the beach near the pier and bones instead or along with shells were lying on the beach not fully recognizable until I realized these were not all shells. We generally see what we expect to see unless our eyes are given a chance to linger and see what is there. These were not scary bones or horrific or signs of murder more like intriguing treasures and remnants of another world and another life. Something about a map that endured the ocean and sand and weather and was something like cloth and something like plastic. I have no recollection what it was of, just that it helped explain some of the things that had washed up to shore. It would make sense if all this were metaphorically part of a parallel life or things lost along the way now unusable and unsalvageable. (Perhaps the map represents my dreams and all that sits around me represents all that I struggle with in my waking world....) It was fascinating and again someone was there with whom we wondered back and forth in simple suggestions and what ifs and look at thats and ideas in quiet reflection and easy exchange and the waters lapping as the only rhythm that could be called the passing of time as time seemed more open than passing and it was a wonderful, casual, restful day.
I can tell in the waking that I have an egregious lack of decompressing creativity in my life right now because of the extent of my frustration and overreaction when kids are more like stones and I no longer have the strength to move them and seemingly the simplest of assignments and means to get them to understand while also enabling them to achieve better grades seem always to go awry and cause more trouble than success. This is my waking life that is consuming me and burning me out. I’m sure you hear easy answers and encouragements for shifting more of the dreaming into the waking and indeed I know that too but just like the students who hear it all but cannot seem to do any of it, I feel a bit like most of me is hidden away in a tiny paper bag up the abandoned and twisted stair behind a bowed but locked and unseen door.
Tuesday, November 5, 2019
Sunday, August 25, 2019
Learning to Write for Me
082519
Learning to Write for Me
Let’s face it. Publishing sucks. I can say that without hesitation even with two published novels under my belt. They’re no longer on the shelf. I don’t have an agent. And I can’t sell hot chocolate to Eskimos.
I didn’t always have the ambition to write for a living and to be honest, I don’t any more (that's a lie---think of it as an exorcism). When I was a kid I just naturally told stories. My philosophy, apparently, was if an adult asked a stupid question it was because what they really wanted was a story. So I gave them one. Of course I remember very few of those but my mom seems to remember many. She says she looks back on those days and shivers at the thought of how easily I could have been removed from our home and my parents fined for neglect at least. They were not neglectful, but my stories seemed to suggest it. That was not my intention, my intention was to tell a story of great adventure, mystery, intrigue. Now I’m proud to think that they were also believable enough that adults in the family, when I was little, would take Mom aside to discuss “that time when ...”!
Stories were just all around me and in me and I had voices in my head that argued or consoled or discussed grave matters—with each other, not with me. Running dialogues all the time. I thought, and still do, in hard copy—editing the sentences crawling through my mind when I walked or waited for friends in a restaurant or stood in a grocery store line or drove to work. All the time.
I’m a third generation writer (at least) and that’s not to make you gasp or think “no wonder,” it merely speaks to how natural and expected it seemed to write things down—feelings, images, dialogue, descriptions, stories. My sister writes also. At least one of her daughters writes. It was natural, then, to claim English Literature as well as Creative Writing as my two majors, though back when I was in school there didn’t seem to be a lot of help from guidance counselors to build your major and I was actually PREVENTED from taking as many writing courses as I had intended and desired and it made me very angry. The classes I did take, however, were great fun and I loved every minute. (Even in high school, it’s easy to believe you’re special when English teachers pretty much tell you your work is brilliant, no matter what you do...and when you fall in love with Beowulf and demand to study a more authentic interpretation of the language and form when they insist on reading horrific narrative versions that skate over two or three “key passages” some idiots think will interest teenagers, you can pretty much design your own courses—but that was another day and time.)
In college, one of the writing classes I took included the requirement to submit so many articles to appropriately fitting publishers. Fortunately, getting published was not a prerequisite. What we were learning was how to write and tailor it to publishing. Turns out everything I wrote for that class was published—like maybe five different articles and stories. I don’t know how much of that was really me, or the connections my professor had. I didn’t know it till class was nearly over that semester, but he was a great pal of my dad’s and they’d worked together on different assignments in years past. At the time, I felt like whatever I wrote was pretty good—not easy, not just whatever flowed, I had to work at it, shape it, edit it, but it was always published. So I believed this is what I would always do and it would always be published. Complicate that with having a very close friend and literary mentor who was a year ahead of me whose thing was primarily poetry and she won every contest she entered and her great dream was to be an editor and publisher. Not long after we graduated, and I was often sending her short stories just for fun, she sent one back to me and said, “This is a novel. Here’s what you do to turn it into one.” So I did and her publishing house published it and I was twenty-seven years old. Career set, but not lucrative. I had to work otherwise to pay bills and I worked in advertising as a copywriter and in a small enough house in the south (my high school and college years were in the upper midwest) with people who knew my father but were giving me a chance to prove myself worthy, that I was copy chief managing freelance writers working with me. Loved the creativity of advertising and marketing (business to business) but hated the business side of it. But it was in this setting that I was able to finish the draft of that first novel and see it published.
I don’t know what happened. It all got away from me. My writing wasn’t good enough or edgy enough to be noticed and propel me into a world of constant demand. I was lazy I guess, had to make ends meet, needed to do other things, getting older all the time. Not realizing that I was maybe running a little scared or a little weary of the pace and demands I saw in a publishing world. That wasn’t who I am. But somehow I strayed somewhat from the love of writing for the sake of writing. The love of the story.
What I haven’t said here is that in college, ironically enough and just before the senior class of writing and submitting, I was very heavily attached to a professor who taught sociology and criminology (I know, I can’t explain it) who was a great fan of my writing (or at least always had something positive to say) and she said to me one day, “It’s time to grow up.” I stood gobsmacked. She waited but then clarified, “It’s time to grow up and share your writing with the world.” My entire life I’d shared my writing with my family and close friends and what I shared was connected with those people specifically in some way. It was time to risk publishing. Was not interested in the least, had not considered this as a career per se, it was just what I did like brush my teeth, take a shower, write. I had no other agenda. Until that day. I don’t blame her but it does speak to the power of a teacher or mentor or whatever you would call her to say the one thing that roots in your head and suddenly becomes a kind of god that grows as a demand, misunderstood or not.
This is the polar opposite of success stories where people are told how worthless they are, or that they’ll never be able to make a living with that thing they love inside them (Bette Middler always comes to mind but there are others), and so they fight against all odds and then...a star is born. Maybe that’s why it’s not working for me.
Fast forward—because that’s literally what time does—I have been teaching for more than two decades and the last fifteen years it’s been in a highly competitive program for the more brilliant high school students pursuing ivy league acceptance and so many of these kids are literally changing the world to become a better place. I am in love with these teenagers and I love my work, but I hate school—the bureaucracy, the unrealistic demands of politicians and administration who have no idea what it’s like to be in a classroom. I’ll just stop there. The point is, who has the energy to write? Well I do, sort of, at times, but not how I thought it would be. Somewhere back there three decades ish ago I had been working on a novel must have been 10 years and was in a time and place where I was finally able to seriously rewrite it for about the third time. I moved closer to my folks and will forever be grateful for the “plot whisperer” my dad was who helped me reorganize it (I suck at plot—my thing is dialogue and setting...character-driven stuff but it’s gotta have plot, oi) and was able to publish it. But publishing it was worse than the first time. See, the biggest problem I have with publishing is that it’s 20% writing and 80% marketing. Yeah I was in marketing and advertising, but as a creative, not on the business, marketing side. Promoting and hunting down where when and how to have book signings and soliciting speaking opportunities and all of that shut me down, basically. I thought that’s what the PUBLISHER was supposed to do. That’s what all the “success stories” seemed to say. Look at Harper Lee, with ONE NOVEL, and J.K. Rowling. You know all the ones I’m talking about.
Consequently I saw myself more as a failure I guess. I didn’t write much as time passed. All the voices in my head, the dialogue, the dreamy stories—these are transgenerational stories, science fiction stories, experiments with narrative forms—began to give up on me. I have three novels sitting unfinished in their respective drawers. My focus has shifted to being a failure because I don’t have (or want, really) the ability to market my stuff, spend time in business ventures, dealing with finances. I am on my own so don’t have the capital to completely devote to making a go of it and quite frankly I don’t approach the writing as a business model and watching myself summer after summer “dabble” in writing (what it looks like from a business end) I would starve to death quite quickly. All of these financial dangers are real. But I’ve lost my baby in all that bath water.
Almost.
Definitely I need an audience. Right now I’m writing with the idea that people will read this and love it like I read and love similarly toned self-revelational writing by some friends of mine. I know better though. It’s too long. Too self absorbed. Doesn’t have the “here’s how you can succeed” bent to it. It’s melancholy and has no plot to speak of....
About a year ago, maybe five—again with that time thing—I decided/realized that the problem was that I had swerved focus to what I cannot control. Beating myself up and shriveling away from what I cannot control. Not in the way I would want to. I tell you what though, it is hard work to shift back to the core and basics—for the love of it—especially when it feels a lot like I’ve been abandoned by my Muse...She has taken her gift and wandered off.
I have to go back to writing for the love of writing. Dwelling in the story for the love of the story. Getting to know fascinating characters within me for simply loving their company and exchanging life giving ideas and lessons. I have to truly, authentically, sincerely, focus on the story and the people in them again without even that absurdly annoying hint of –aha! And THEN I can publish it!
I have to come to terms with the commitment to never write to publish again. This is the single most compelling reason I fail to write well I believe. I know that I still want to publish. That publishing, the idea of publishing has succeeded in making me believe therein lies my worth as a writer as well as my reason to write.
Is it too late? Once that innocence is lost can the purity of the well spring water flow ever again?
Recently I read a short story that was so well written I feel like I saw it as a movie actually! About a woman in the west (like Arizona) who painted all the time. Alone. Loved it. Lived it. A young Hispanic boy shows up one day requesting a job. To work for her as an assistant, cook, whatever she needed. She’s a bit of a recluse, loner, odd and countercultural in that regard. Somehow her paintings were “seen” and had become important or popular and began to have financial returns for her. But she focuses always on the art. A journalist shows up one day to interview her and in the interview there was a question something like, Now that you are famous, does that have an impact on your work? Has it affected the subjects you choose? These questions stop her cold. The rest of the story follows her rather dismantling her life, she eventually destroys all of her work because she knows she is dying, or that death is imminent and she can’t stand the thought of her work being pawed over and judged by others, can’t stand the thought of being famous or known for her work. Apparently this is based on a true story or at least a real character who felt similarly. This woman was truly called to create and that’s what she did. The notion that her beloved creations would be exploited for monetary profit not only crippled her but enraged her to the point she felt she had to protect her creations (or protect herself, her own identity) by destroying them with her own hand before allowing them to be destroyed by fame (misunderstood by it).
I’m not looking for that extreme. Story telling is a way of connecting with each other. Vital part of our human existence is to touch and be touched. Story is powerful for that. It can be. I’ve never really considered “what am I trying to say” so much as just following the lives of characters who come to visit my imagination and I simply get to know them. They’ve always been the ones to have something to say. Until the idea of publishing sorta took over the greater segment of my mind and it is now part of what prevents me from writing.
Every day I’m working at spending some portion of the time writing. Anything. Thoughts like these, memories, characters, dialogue, pieces, descriptions of the surroundings where I am, sometimes I share them with one or two people, sometimes a bit on facebook. But they have to be short so I feel like I’m not fully developing anything and especially not a novel. I suck at plot even to this day and my plot whisperer is gone. The great story of my life that I wanted to write and was met with great joy in this plan by the driving force and we worked together but I didn’t make it the priority I should have and within five to six years she was dead and now gone and I have no source of information because family that is left is against my writing it and one is threateningly against it. It’s hard to write with that threat over your head especially knowing that you don’t really know the story like you want to to write it. Look at me shifting to the second person.
There is something wrong and unfinished about these three manuscripts but I can’t help but wonder to what degree the reason is this knowledge they won’t be published or I won’t follow through with ensuring they are or facing the failure of soliciting and failing...the energy !! At my age and stage... Not old, mind, but just ... not pulled in that motivation.
Like any marriage, any first and profound love, especially with the love of your life, the BEING and DREAM and CONSUMMATION (the success) takes determination, permission, sitting with and listening, listening, continuing to listen, to speak softly and tenderly, to touch, to focus on the needs of the other more than your own, to recommit to time and energy, to be with, to dwell, for better or worse, digging deeply together to what really matters, to then turn and side by side move forward with the common goal and desire, to build together, to encourage each other, to abide, to linger, to chip away at the challenge, to continue, to love and nurture that love with more of the same. Every day and perpetually. This is what I want. To live in this love and relationship with my muse and my stories. This is what I want.
Learning to Write for Me
Let’s face it. Publishing sucks. I can say that without hesitation even with two published novels under my belt. They’re no longer on the shelf. I don’t have an agent. And I can’t sell hot chocolate to Eskimos.
I didn’t always have the ambition to write for a living and to be honest, I don’t any more (that's a lie---think of it as an exorcism). When I was a kid I just naturally told stories. My philosophy, apparently, was if an adult asked a stupid question it was because what they really wanted was a story. So I gave them one. Of course I remember very few of those but my mom seems to remember many. She says she looks back on those days and shivers at the thought of how easily I could have been removed from our home and my parents fined for neglect at least. They were not neglectful, but my stories seemed to suggest it. That was not my intention, my intention was to tell a story of great adventure, mystery, intrigue. Now I’m proud to think that they were also believable enough that adults in the family, when I was little, would take Mom aside to discuss “that time when ...”!
Stories were just all around me and in me and I had voices in my head that argued or consoled or discussed grave matters—with each other, not with me. Running dialogues all the time. I thought, and still do, in hard copy—editing the sentences crawling through my mind when I walked or waited for friends in a restaurant or stood in a grocery store line or drove to work. All the time.
I’m a third generation writer (at least) and that’s not to make you gasp or think “no wonder,” it merely speaks to how natural and expected it seemed to write things down—feelings, images, dialogue, descriptions, stories. My sister writes also. At least one of her daughters writes. It was natural, then, to claim English Literature as well as Creative Writing as my two majors, though back when I was in school there didn’t seem to be a lot of help from guidance counselors to build your major and I was actually PREVENTED from taking as many writing courses as I had intended and desired and it made me very angry. The classes I did take, however, were great fun and I loved every minute. (Even in high school, it’s easy to believe you’re special when English teachers pretty much tell you your work is brilliant, no matter what you do...and when you fall in love with Beowulf and demand to study a more authentic interpretation of the language and form when they insist on reading horrific narrative versions that skate over two or three “key passages” some idiots think will interest teenagers, you can pretty much design your own courses—but that was another day and time.)
In college, one of the writing classes I took included the requirement to submit so many articles to appropriately fitting publishers. Fortunately, getting published was not a prerequisite. What we were learning was how to write and tailor it to publishing. Turns out everything I wrote for that class was published—like maybe five different articles and stories. I don’t know how much of that was really me, or the connections my professor had. I didn’t know it till class was nearly over that semester, but he was a great pal of my dad’s and they’d worked together on different assignments in years past. At the time, I felt like whatever I wrote was pretty good—not easy, not just whatever flowed, I had to work at it, shape it, edit it, but it was always published. So I believed this is what I would always do and it would always be published. Complicate that with having a very close friend and literary mentor who was a year ahead of me whose thing was primarily poetry and she won every contest she entered and her great dream was to be an editor and publisher. Not long after we graduated, and I was often sending her short stories just for fun, she sent one back to me and said, “This is a novel. Here’s what you do to turn it into one.” So I did and her publishing house published it and I was twenty-seven years old. Career set, but not lucrative. I had to work otherwise to pay bills and I worked in advertising as a copywriter and in a small enough house in the south (my high school and college years were in the upper midwest) with people who knew my father but were giving me a chance to prove myself worthy, that I was copy chief managing freelance writers working with me. Loved the creativity of advertising and marketing (business to business) but hated the business side of it. But it was in this setting that I was able to finish the draft of that first novel and see it published.
I don’t know what happened. It all got away from me. My writing wasn’t good enough or edgy enough to be noticed and propel me into a world of constant demand. I was lazy I guess, had to make ends meet, needed to do other things, getting older all the time. Not realizing that I was maybe running a little scared or a little weary of the pace and demands I saw in a publishing world. That wasn’t who I am. But somehow I strayed somewhat from the love of writing for the sake of writing. The love of the story.
What I haven’t said here is that in college, ironically enough and just before the senior class of writing and submitting, I was very heavily attached to a professor who taught sociology and criminology (I know, I can’t explain it) who was a great fan of my writing (or at least always had something positive to say) and she said to me one day, “It’s time to grow up.” I stood gobsmacked. She waited but then clarified, “It’s time to grow up and share your writing with the world.” My entire life I’d shared my writing with my family and close friends and what I shared was connected with those people specifically in some way. It was time to risk publishing. Was not interested in the least, had not considered this as a career per se, it was just what I did like brush my teeth, take a shower, write. I had no other agenda. Until that day. I don’t blame her but it does speak to the power of a teacher or mentor or whatever you would call her to say the one thing that roots in your head and suddenly becomes a kind of god that grows as a demand, misunderstood or not.
This is the polar opposite of success stories where people are told how worthless they are, or that they’ll never be able to make a living with that thing they love inside them (Bette Middler always comes to mind but there are others), and so they fight against all odds and then...a star is born. Maybe that’s why it’s not working for me.
Fast forward—because that’s literally what time does—I have been teaching for more than two decades and the last fifteen years it’s been in a highly competitive program for the more brilliant high school students pursuing ivy league acceptance and so many of these kids are literally changing the world to become a better place. I am in love with these teenagers and I love my work, but I hate school—the bureaucracy, the unrealistic demands of politicians and administration who have no idea what it’s like to be in a classroom. I’ll just stop there. The point is, who has the energy to write? Well I do, sort of, at times, but not how I thought it would be. Somewhere back there three decades ish ago I had been working on a novel must have been 10 years and was in a time and place where I was finally able to seriously rewrite it for about the third time. I moved closer to my folks and will forever be grateful for the “plot whisperer” my dad was who helped me reorganize it (I suck at plot—my thing is dialogue and setting...character-driven stuff but it’s gotta have plot, oi) and was able to publish it. But publishing it was worse than the first time. See, the biggest problem I have with publishing is that it’s 20% writing and 80% marketing. Yeah I was in marketing and advertising, but as a creative, not on the business, marketing side. Promoting and hunting down where when and how to have book signings and soliciting speaking opportunities and all of that shut me down, basically. I thought that’s what the PUBLISHER was supposed to do. That’s what all the “success stories” seemed to say. Look at Harper Lee, with ONE NOVEL, and J.K. Rowling. You know all the ones I’m talking about.
Consequently I saw myself more as a failure I guess. I didn’t write much as time passed. All the voices in my head, the dialogue, the dreamy stories—these are transgenerational stories, science fiction stories, experiments with narrative forms—began to give up on me. I have three novels sitting unfinished in their respective drawers. My focus has shifted to being a failure because I don’t have (or want, really) the ability to market my stuff, spend time in business ventures, dealing with finances. I am on my own so don’t have the capital to completely devote to making a go of it and quite frankly I don’t approach the writing as a business model and watching myself summer after summer “dabble” in writing (what it looks like from a business end) I would starve to death quite quickly. All of these financial dangers are real. But I’ve lost my baby in all that bath water.
Almost.
Definitely I need an audience. Right now I’m writing with the idea that people will read this and love it like I read and love similarly toned self-revelational writing by some friends of mine. I know better though. It’s too long. Too self absorbed. Doesn’t have the “here’s how you can succeed” bent to it. It’s melancholy and has no plot to speak of....
About a year ago, maybe five—again with that time thing—I decided/realized that the problem was that I had swerved focus to what I cannot control. Beating myself up and shriveling away from what I cannot control. Not in the way I would want to. I tell you what though, it is hard work to shift back to the core and basics—for the love of it—especially when it feels a lot like I’ve been abandoned by my Muse...She has taken her gift and wandered off.
I have to go back to writing for the love of writing. Dwelling in the story for the love of the story. Getting to know fascinating characters within me for simply loving their company and exchanging life giving ideas and lessons. I have to truly, authentically, sincerely, focus on the story and the people in them again without even that absurdly annoying hint of –aha! And THEN I can publish it!
I have to come to terms with the commitment to never write to publish again. This is the single most compelling reason I fail to write well I believe. I know that I still want to publish. That publishing, the idea of publishing has succeeded in making me believe therein lies my worth as a writer as well as my reason to write.
Is it too late? Once that innocence is lost can the purity of the well spring water flow ever again?
Recently I read a short story that was so well written I feel like I saw it as a movie actually! About a woman in the west (like Arizona) who painted all the time. Alone. Loved it. Lived it. A young Hispanic boy shows up one day requesting a job. To work for her as an assistant, cook, whatever she needed. She’s a bit of a recluse, loner, odd and countercultural in that regard. Somehow her paintings were “seen” and had become important or popular and began to have financial returns for her. But she focuses always on the art. A journalist shows up one day to interview her and in the interview there was a question something like, Now that you are famous, does that have an impact on your work? Has it affected the subjects you choose? These questions stop her cold. The rest of the story follows her rather dismantling her life, she eventually destroys all of her work because she knows she is dying, or that death is imminent and she can’t stand the thought of her work being pawed over and judged by others, can’t stand the thought of being famous or known for her work. Apparently this is based on a true story or at least a real character who felt similarly. This woman was truly called to create and that’s what she did. The notion that her beloved creations would be exploited for monetary profit not only crippled her but enraged her to the point she felt she had to protect her creations (or protect herself, her own identity) by destroying them with her own hand before allowing them to be destroyed by fame (misunderstood by it).
I’m not looking for that extreme. Story telling is a way of connecting with each other. Vital part of our human existence is to touch and be touched. Story is powerful for that. It can be. I’ve never really considered “what am I trying to say” so much as just following the lives of characters who come to visit my imagination and I simply get to know them. They’ve always been the ones to have something to say. Until the idea of publishing sorta took over the greater segment of my mind and it is now part of what prevents me from writing.
Every day I’m working at spending some portion of the time writing. Anything. Thoughts like these, memories, characters, dialogue, pieces, descriptions of the surroundings where I am, sometimes I share them with one or two people, sometimes a bit on facebook. But they have to be short so I feel like I’m not fully developing anything and especially not a novel. I suck at plot even to this day and my plot whisperer is gone. The great story of my life that I wanted to write and was met with great joy in this plan by the driving force and we worked together but I didn’t make it the priority I should have and within five to six years she was dead and now gone and I have no source of information because family that is left is against my writing it and one is threateningly against it. It’s hard to write with that threat over your head especially knowing that you don’t really know the story like you want to to write it. Look at me shifting to the second person.
There is something wrong and unfinished about these three manuscripts but I can’t help but wonder to what degree the reason is this knowledge they won’t be published or I won’t follow through with ensuring they are or facing the failure of soliciting and failing...the energy !! At my age and stage... Not old, mind, but just ... not pulled in that motivation.
Like any marriage, any first and profound love, especially with the love of your life, the BEING and DREAM and CONSUMMATION (the success) takes determination, permission, sitting with and listening, listening, continuing to listen, to speak softly and tenderly, to touch, to focus on the needs of the other more than your own, to recommit to time and energy, to be with, to dwell, for better or worse, digging deeply together to what really matters, to then turn and side by side move forward with the common goal and desire, to build together, to encourage each other, to abide, to linger, to chip away at the challenge, to continue, to love and nurture that love with more of the same. Every day and perpetually. This is what I want. To live in this love and relationship with my muse and my stories. This is what I want.
Saturday, March 2, 2019
March blessings
March is fresh, the only one you’ll get out of 2019, the only March 2019 you’ll get in your whole life. Spring is near—it is crouched down hidden in thick tree limbs with yellow eyes glowing in the dark of winter waiting to —YES! SPRING— into the world once again in the blessed cycle of seasons. Birth is painful and rebirth carries with it much of the pain in memories and lives lived and relived and waiting to be touched deeply where healing can swell and embrace the hurts and losses and regrets and let me tell you this spring, this one, the one just on the rim of our reality will be held in awe even as it devours me as earth devours the seeds lying dormant...I will hold it all in awe as I learn and relearn to marvel with great gratitude how we are all connected whether we see it or hear it or taste it or not the reality is there and it sounds like quiet cool trickles of spring water melting down the rocky hills and it smells like jasmine at night and lavender in the morning and looks like streaks of yellow and green and red and purple spilled out across the skies and feels like lambs’ wool and smells like pancakes and all these sensations and images are known to you because we are connected and when we love or walk alongside in whatever capacity we extend gifts whether sweet like caramel and chocolate or difficult but necessary like digging out cancer the gifts we extend are connections that will multiply into blessings we cannot imagine right now big and small but always there for the taking and receiving and giving back and this morning I marvel at my love for words and stories coursing deep in my hereditary veins and observed in my father’s life and my mother’s love of books and my sister and I wrote stories and made up songs and made books all our lives and of my greatest loves is the storyteller from the deepest south and her writing influenced a Chinese writer I have read before and now because of friendship shared in mutual love of story on stage and film who welcomed me into her family and realm of friends and love of stories and writing words on paper and extended a find of flash fiction which I now explore and read and just this morning that Chinese writer is being showcased and his great influence is my favorite writer and I am panting with anticipation to read his stories again and reenter her world of stories and what a great thing right here on the edge of falling off into more days ahead full to overflowing with overwhelming emotions extreme and calming and an answer to the prayer of my deepest longing to find the connections I often fear I have lost and now I remember I re*member we are all inextricably connected for better and worse and all the worse will be better because we take a moment to look at each other and our lives and our gifts with eyes of gratitude and hearts tender for the touching.
Monday, February 18, 2019
Five Years like yesterday
Turns out we’d both had a rough week. February 13 was the fourth anniversary of her younger brother’s death. He was 7 when he died; she was 12. She had been in denial, never speaking of it, never thinking of it, had put him and the grief out of her mind—he had been sick all of his life, diagnosed with a rare disease I can’t remember the name of, but she said it in two ways and even described it and all I heard was the debilitating way he had begun to diminish from his first birthday until he died at the age of 7.
She said last year she was playing a concert on her 16th birthday, just days after the third anniversary of his death, when it all suddenly flooded to and through her without warning. It had just simply taken her over for the duration of the concert. She described how she just kept playing her instrument but was blinded by streams of tears and it didn’t let up the whole time. “I mean it was my sweet sixteen,” she said. “I was supposed to be happy and enjoying it but all I could think was how I didn’t deserve it. I was here and he wasn’t.”
But since then, over the last year, she has been able to talk about it a little bit with friends and now here in our Extended Essay meeting. Her mother rarely speaks of it but, immediately after he died, began studying to be, and now is, a social worker. Her father has never spoken about any of it.
My week, too, had been hellish and all I could think of was getting home and decompressing with a four-day weekend—with only One Billion Rising to worry about. I needed to rest; I was spent and exhausted. I craved the solitude ahead and time stretching out through the next several days of just being. It had been all I could do to walk through the last few days and the charade of school work, planning, assessing, interacting, teaching. Worst two days in years. Completely at the mercy of unrelenting grief.
I had forgotten we were scheduled for a meeting but fortunately she is a student in my last block class and she remembered. She is bright and has a glow about her I noticed right away when she first came to class August of last year as a sophomore. Ethereal, charming, with a fabulous imagination; she has already written a full length novel full of fantastical ideas—rather dark, as I recall, and more science fiction, aliens sort of thing. Her long, curly blond hair adds to her faerie like presence and I can easily see her living in Rivendell.
She has chosen to work with three stories that have trauma as the driving force of the narrative. How the narrative voice is shaped by this trauma; I can’t recall specifically the finer points. Each novel has a different style and a different trauma: death of a young sibling, death of a lover, death of a parent at an early age. Yet each of the first person narratives seems to play out the struggle with commonality in the distortion of the unreliability. I asked her what drew her to such macabre, dark narratives?
That question led to the revelation of the 4th anniversary of her brother’s death yesterday as the same day as the 5th anniversary of Dad’s terminal diagnosis. We discussed how uncanny grief is and how it strikes without warning or seeming connectivity to the present and that no matter how much time passes, it doesn’t have any bearing on the actual strike whenever it chooses to violate the present.
As deep and profound as we got in this meeting, it only lasted 20 minutes. It was lovely to be able to speak of the most intensely painful thing each of us had ever experienced...that we both had this horrific anniversary the day before...how we had been each completely tsunamied by the intensity of emotion just yesterday, yet now we could speak of everything with clarity, completely transparent, unweighted, painless, only a day later.
She gathered her things to go and I gave her directives for following up with a written reflection in the software, and to upload the outline she’d shown me, and that I would be writing a summary also. Then she stood there for a moment and we just were quiet for a brief second and she said, this was good. I agreed. She added, this was kinda therapeutic. I nodded. It’s nice, she said, to be able to talk about it all with someone who knows what it’s like.
Likewise.
She said last year she was playing a concert on her 16th birthday, just days after the third anniversary of his death, when it all suddenly flooded to and through her without warning. It had just simply taken her over for the duration of the concert. She described how she just kept playing her instrument but was blinded by streams of tears and it didn’t let up the whole time. “I mean it was my sweet sixteen,” she said. “I was supposed to be happy and enjoying it but all I could think was how I didn’t deserve it. I was here and he wasn’t.”
But since then, over the last year, she has been able to talk about it a little bit with friends and now here in our Extended Essay meeting. Her mother rarely speaks of it but, immediately after he died, began studying to be, and now is, a social worker. Her father has never spoken about any of it.
My week, too, had been hellish and all I could think of was getting home and decompressing with a four-day weekend—with only One Billion Rising to worry about. I needed to rest; I was spent and exhausted. I craved the solitude ahead and time stretching out through the next several days of just being. It had been all I could do to walk through the last few days and the charade of school work, planning, assessing, interacting, teaching. Worst two days in years. Completely at the mercy of unrelenting grief.
I had forgotten we were scheduled for a meeting but fortunately she is a student in my last block class and she remembered. She is bright and has a glow about her I noticed right away when she first came to class August of last year as a sophomore. Ethereal, charming, with a fabulous imagination; she has already written a full length novel full of fantastical ideas—rather dark, as I recall, and more science fiction, aliens sort of thing. Her long, curly blond hair adds to her faerie like presence and I can easily see her living in Rivendell.
She has chosen to work with three stories that have trauma as the driving force of the narrative. How the narrative voice is shaped by this trauma; I can’t recall specifically the finer points. Each novel has a different style and a different trauma: death of a young sibling, death of a lover, death of a parent at an early age. Yet each of the first person narratives seems to play out the struggle with commonality in the distortion of the unreliability. I asked her what drew her to such macabre, dark narratives?
That question led to the revelation of the 4th anniversary of her brother’s death yesterday as the same day as the 5th anniversary of Dad’s terminal diagnosis. We discussed how uncanny grief is and how it strikes without warning or seeming connectivity to the present and that no matter how much time passes, it doesn’t have any bearing on the actual strike whenever it chooses to violate the present.
As deep and profound as we got in this meeting, it only lasted 20 minutes. It was lovely to be able to speak of the most intensely painful thing each of us had ever experienced...that we both had this horrific anniversary the day before...how we had been each completely tsunamied by the intensity of emotion just yesterday, yet now we could speak of everything with clarity, completely transparent, unweighted, painless, only a day later.
She gathered her things to go and I gave her directives for following up with a written reflection in the software, and to upload the outline she’d shown me, and that I would be writing a summary also. Then she stood there for a moment and we just were quiet for a brief second and she said, this was good. I agreed. She added, this was kinda therapeutic. I nodded. It’s nice, she said, to be able to talk about it all with someone who knows what it’s like.
Likewise.
Saturday, February 9, 2019
A Brother's Conscience
This story is going to sound cliche. Because it is. But it’s true. Every word. Even the adage, “Ya just never know.” We say that a lot at school—when it comes to kids...and not knowing what they might be going through at home or in their heads.
I got a big surprise yesterday and I’m still trying to figure out what to do (if anything) about it...or how to follow up with it.
I have three classes of pre-IB sophomores–that means they’re about 15 years old. All about social development and hormones and being terrified of “exposure.” Takes a lot for these kids to risk revealing who they really are: rejection is real and devastating, they fear.
Since the first week of January we’ve been working with poetry. Started them off with performance poetry as a path to studying structured poetry, trying to make it more accessible , more friendly. We’ve read and tested on Mary Oliver’s Handbook of Poetry and every day we’ve watched videos I’ve carefully selected of slam poetry, performance poetry, and spoken word poetry. After each poem they are asked to write their impressions, not just of the content but of the choices the poet has made to deliver their words effectively. Volume, cadence, word choice, prosody, pacing, sound, metaphor, internal rhyme, sensory imagery, body language, gestures, all of it.
They’ve been working in solitude as well as small groups to develop their own performance poem. I’ve encouraged them to pick topics that tap into their passion about ... something, anything. You guessed it—that’s everything from ice cream, to loss, to pollution, to shoes, to relationships, to self image...all of it.
One of the aspects of teaching at South Fork that I love is how many cultures are represented through these kids. They are Irish, Scandinavian, African, Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Mexican, Guatemalan, and more. This is the kind of assignment that sometimes taps into those identities in unexpected ways. One Vietnamese boy wrote of his sorrow at seeing how leaving Vietnam has been so painful for his parents and how his identity is fractured by it.
Another student, a very quiet young man, Hispanic, never ever says a word. Nice, respectful, mostly lost in an English Literature class and struggles with it all (not the language, but the study of literature and analysis). I’ve spoken with him a couple of times since August, trying to find a way to support him, get him help with it. He’s holding his own, but he seems so disengaged. I was afraid he wouldn’t have much to offer–he keeps to himself so completely. He has friends, he’s well-adjusted, he’s just not socially connected with the kids in this class (except maybe three other guys).
Yesterday was his dress rehearsal—they have this opportunity to see how well they’ve internalized their material, hear what it sounds like while delivering to an audience, test out their plan for body language and gestures and pacing. His turn came up. Yes, I confess I do pray at those moments because more than anything I don’t want the experience to add to their fears or any negative experiences of similar assignments. He took a deep breath when I gave him the cue to start. He had nothing in his hands—most kids keep their poem with them in case they sort of melt into stage fright and blank out. He stood, rubbed his hands together and started his poem. There was gentle internal rhyming, vivid images, deep emotion. It was a poem honoring and apologizing to his little brother. He spoke of how his mom told him not to be like his older brothers who have been in trouble with the law. He spoke of how his mom introduced him to his baby brother when he was brought into the world and encouraged him to be a better big brother to him—to love him, protect him, help him grow up. He confessed — and was specific — about times he’d failed his little brother. Times he was mean to him. How sorry he was, how he hopes that recent changes have made a difference for him. How he kept his emotions in check is beyond me, he frequently covered his chin and stopped speaking for a brief moment, tears brimmed in his eyes, but he kept going. This young man, who had never said more than 10 words in class since August, delivered his poem for over 5 minutes in front of class full of 15 year old kids who sat in rapt attention. That’s 25 kids in that classroom. No one even looked away.
He finished, everyone clapped, like they had done for all the others. And he sat back in his seat—front seat of the second row. He was the last of the rehearsal list and I was a weepy mess. I made some comment about how there wasn’t a dry eye in the room and that this was an amazing piece of work. Then I told them all to stand up and stretch a little bit, take a small break. NOBODY went up to this kid. Nobody. They huddled in twos and threes, walking around to each other and chatting. I confess at first I was surprised until I recalled their age, and their lack of maturity in knowing how or what to say—vulnerability is a dangerous, bottomless pit. I went up to the kid, put my hands on his shoulders and leaned over toward him, my forehead to his and said, “That was awesome. Amazing. Thank you.” And he nodded.
Ya just never know.
I learn a lot about courage, pain, hope, and the power of the human spirit from these amazing young people. Deeply grateful for them.
I got a big surprise yesterday and I’m still trying to figure out what to do (if anything) about it...or how to follow up with it.
I have three classes of pre-IB sophomores–that means they’re about 15 years old. All about social development and hormones and being terrified of “exposure.” Takes a lot for these kids to risk revealing who they really are: rejection is real and devastating, they fear.
Since the first week of January we’ve been working with poetry. Started them off with performance poetry as a path to studying structured poetry, trying to make it more accessible , more friendly. We’ve read and tested on Mary Oliver’s Handbook of Poetry and every day we’ve watched videos I’ve carefully selected of slam poetry, performance poetry, and spoken word poetry. After each poem they are asked to write their impressions, not just of the content but of the choices the poet has made to deliver their words effectively. Volume, cadence, word choice, prosody, pacing, sound, metaphor, internal rhyme, sensory imagery, body language, gestures, all of it.
They’ve been working in solitude as well as small groups to develop their own performance poem. I’ve encouraged them to pick topics that tap into their passion about ... something, anything. You guessed it—that’s everything from ice cream, to loss, to pollution, to shoes, to relationships, to self image...all of it.
One of the aspects of teaching at South Fork that I love is how many cultures are represented through these kids. They are Irish, Scandinavian, African, Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Mexican, Guatemalan, and more. This is the kind of assignment that sometimes taps into those identities in unexpected ways. One Vietnamese boy wrote of his sorrow at seeing how leaving Vietnam has been so painful for his parents and how his identity is fractured by it.
Another student, a very quiet young man, Hispanic, never ever says a word. Nice, respectful, mostly lost in an English Literature class and struggles with it all (not the language, but the study of literature and analysis). I’ve spoken with him a couple of times since August, trying to find a way to support him, get him help with it. He’s holding his own, but he seems so disengaged. I was afraid he wouldn’t have much to offer–he keeps to himself so completely. He has friends, he’s well-adjusted, he’s just not socially connected with the kids in this class (except maybe three other guys).
Yesterday was his dress rehearsal—they have this opportunity to see how well they’ve internalized their material, hear what it sounds like while delivering to an audience, test out their plan for body language and gestures and pacing. His turn came up. Yes, I confess I do pray at those moments because more than anything I don’t want the experience to add to their fears or any negative experiences of similar assignments. He took a deep breath when I gave him the cue to start. He had nothing in his hands—most kids keep their poem with them in case they sort of melt into stage fright and blank out. He stood, rubbed his hands together and started his poem. There was gentle internal rhyming, vivid images, deep emotion. It was a poem honoring and apologizing to his little brother. He spoke of how his mom told him not to be like his older brothers who have been in trouble with the law. He spoke of how his mom introduced him to his baby brother when he was brought into the world and encouraged him to be a better big brother to him—to love him, protect him, help him grow up. He confessed — and was specific — about times he’d failed his little brother. Times he was mean to him. How sorry he was, how he hopes that recent changes have made a difference for him. How he kept his emotions in check is beyond me, he frequently covered his chin and stopped speaking for a brief moment, tears brimmed in his eyes, but he kept going. This young man, who had never said more than 10 words in class since August, delivered his poem for over 5 minutes in front of class full of 15 year old kids who sat in rapt attention. That’s 25 kids in that classroom. No one even looked away.
He finished, everyone clapped, like they had done for all the others. And he sat back in his seat—front seat of the second row. He was the last of the rehearsal list and I was a weepy mess. I made some comment about how there wasn’t a dry eye in the room and that this was an amazing piece of work. Then I told them all to stand up and stretch a little bit, take a small break. NOBODY went up to this kid. Nobody. They huddled in twos and threes, walking around to each other and chatting. I confess at first I was surprised until I recalled their age, and their lack of maturity in knowing how or what to say—vulnerability is a dangerous, bottomless pit. I went up to the kid, put my hands on his shoulders and leaned over toward him, my forehead to his and said, “That was awesome. Amazing. Thank you.” And he nodded.
Ya just never know.
I learn a lot about courage, pain, hope, and the power of the human spirit from these amazing young people. Deeply grateful for them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)