Writing Full Tilt

In this extraordinary moment when we are gathering ourselves up from the years of a pandemic, a war is now ravaging Ukraine and, like all wars, the world beyond. April is poetry month. What can a poet say? As poets, we are also listeners to other voices. Right now, is the time to listen as well as write. I invite all of us to turn our attention to the poetic voices of Ukraine and Russia who know the deep roots of imperial travesty. They have everything to say and have been saying it for centuries. Take time to find one or two of these voices and read what they are telling us. Honor them by taking in their words. This article on Literary Hub focuses on the work of Ukranian poet, Halyna Kruk, a voice that speaks about and against the aggressions toward Ukraine. Her voice is a perfect place to start.

https://lithub.com/war-shortens-the-distance-from-person-to-person-from-birth-to-death-new-work-by-ukrainian-poet-halyna-kruk/

The Russian poet, Polina Barskova quotes W.H. Auden: poetry makes nothing happen, and then she continues, saying, “we’ve been wondering ever since — are we so impotent, so powerless? Poetry cannot shoot, cannot heal, cannot abolish death. Poetry’s jobs are minor: to comfort a mourner, a lover, for a brief moment. Elegy, one of the earliest forms of poetry, was born as funeral song. As I see it now, the job of consolation is crucial, the job of giving medicine — even if it cannot bring anybody back to life, it can patch the texture of life as it is, make it softer, warmer. Damn it, make it prettier.”

Ukrainian Poets: Serhiy Zhadan, Halyna Kruk, Illy Kaminsky, Oksana Zabuzhko, Ilya Kiva, Kateryna Kalytko, Vasyl Holoborodko, Yurii Andrukhovy, Iryna Shuvalova, Natalka Bilotserkivets, Ihor Pavlyuk, Moysey Fishbein, Liudmyla Skyrda, Hanna Yablonska, Iryna Senyk, Lyubov Sirota, Myroslav Laiuk, Anastasia Afanasieva, Anna Bagriana,

Russian Poets: Anna Akhmatova,  Marina Tsvetaeva, Bella Akhmadulina, Vera Polozkova, Elena Fanilova, Maria Stepanova

No war                       by Halyna Kruk

my love language has broken teeth
spit, you say, spit ‘em all out, spit ‘em quick!
you’ll get straighter ones.
with a better bite.

my love language is a wreck,
avoid this thicket, it’s mine upon mine, a tangle of tripwires,
you never know what a word really means,
which memory you can touch, which will detonate.

we planted this hedge so no one would get hit,
hung caution signs to warn the others
of death disguised as a pretty view

but you just offer to remove them so nothing
ruins the picture, not waiting for the sappers,
not clearing the empty terrain of thorns.

my love language is heavy as a father’s gaze,
immovable as the eyelids upon his son’s coffin,
which they used all week to steady their guns,
my love language is choking on its words like his mother

I held it close when I was crying and to stop crying,
I held it close. I knotted it like a camouflage net,
color coordinated with the season, so it could
hide someone.

you say don’t get mad. be wiser. take the high road.
tame your love language. push it out. purge yourself of it.
plant a flower in this scorched land.
in this empty place in the language and in you

you must have saved a few flower seeds.
you must have saved a kind word someplace.
someplace in your soul, that will forgive everything

my love language has grown so big
that my tongue comes out with it,
and my soul come out
with this soulless language.

Translated from the Ukrainian by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk.

Upcoming Events

Weekly Workshops

Monday Evenings 6:30 – 9:00 p.m. EDT, May 23 – 20 $200

Tuesday Mornings 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. EDT, May 24 – 21 $250

Writers with all levels of experience welcome. Each workshop is a place to build and loosen your creative muscles! For more information: maureen@maureenbjones.com

Prompt Photo

Holding on is the work of this day. We are all trying to keep track, stay steady, manage our everything. And then we spill something, arrive late, can’t remember. The pandemic, the war, the social rifts we struggle to process are all taxing our brains and spirits. And then we lose our notebook, or the computer swallows the file. And that file, that notebook contain our hearts and our poems, our characters and our creative dreams. The word lost means so much more now, and it always meant more than we could stand already. How do we grab back what slipped from our fingers? How do we step back into those words?

Several weeks ago, my glasses broke into several small pieces in my hands. Like everyone who needs glasses, an instant vulnerability arrived along with panic. I need to see. I brought my poor, wounded spectacles to the local eye shop and presented them to a man with an outstretched hand. “Yes,” he said. “Please sit for a moment.” I thought he was being polite, certain that he would return instantly and tell me that the glasses were hopeless. I spent the next few minutes rapidly going through my finances to figure out how I would afford a new pair. The man came from the back room and handed me my glasses. Repaired. Fixed. Better than new. I tried not to embarrass him and me by crying, saying thank you a dozen times. He gently said, “Not at all. Happy to help.” My next stop was the grocery store, and as I put necessaries into my cart, I thought, “Thank you isn’t enough. I can see!” I bought a chocolate marble Bundt cake and a bag of honey crisp apples, returned to the eye shop and offered them as gratitude. The man put his hands together and bowed slightly, then spread his arms and said, “You have made us all so happy!” We both laughed, and again I tried not to cry. Loss and recovery. Vulnerability and restoration.

When we lose our writing, it is devastating. We are flung into a blank landscape without solid footing. We grope and despair. But there is a guide to help us back to our stories and poems. It’s a bit like the man going into the back room. Set everything else aside and sit quietly, perhaps with eyes closed. Let your mind settle and then let it wander. This is the same as remembering a vivid dream. Nothing has gone away; it’s all still there in that back room. As you wander, you’ll begin to notice parts of what you lost: a bit of description, a line or two of dialogue; the rhythm of the language, emotion and tone, or an image that held the essence of what you want to say. You will gather up enough, more than enough to piece together what you lost. It won’t be exactly the same, but it will be close, and, like the glasses, perhaps the next, improved draft of what you had originally written.  “The strands are all there; to the memory nothing is ever lost.” Eudora Welty.

Events

Writing Workshop Tuesday Mornings are Back! There are still open spots: three hours each week that will lift you up and settle your nerves. March 15 – May 17, 2022. 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. EST. Each writer will have the opportunity to bring in a manuscript for peer review using the AWA Method. $500/prorated. maureen@maureenbjones.com

Maud & Addie is a finalist in the Indie Awards Book of the Year contest sponsored by Foreword Reviews!

Prompt Photo

Painting by Gordon K. Grant. Currently at the Ventura CA Post Office

Beginning a novel is like the start of a romance with the spark and daydreams we enter, and a world newly created. Middles are like creating our own maps, the kind early explorers made who half believed they might fall off the page if they sailed too far, but they tried anyway. And then there are endings, and those can be tough. We fall in love with our characters, become seriously involved in all their business and sometimes find them more comforting than the realities where we actually exist. Why would we want to leave them? Why would we want to say good-bye?

Writing that last chapter, that last scene is like standing on the station platform and watching a dear friend’s face getting smaller, then blur, then vanish as the train pulls away. And that feeling of being left behind is lonely. Or the reverse, where we are the ones getting up from the café table and leaving our interior writing companion still sitting with a half cup of tea and bits of scone on a plate. It’s abandonment either way. Loss is loss and why wouldn’t we let the end languish, so the last chapter remains undone, an open door?

But that doesn’t really work. That’s neglect and pulls at us just as strongly. And we know we are letting ourselves down. We want an ending that measures up to everything that has gone before. Which can feel like a hefty ask. The place to start is back at the beginning. Read your own novel as if you have pulled it off a library shelf. Read it the way you read all the other novels you stack beside your bed. Let the story carry you and let the voices lead you through the action and emotional rhythms. Make notes if you must but try to be inside the book to feel its atmosphere and flavor. It is heading in a direction; it has a current. Follow it and believe in where that current points you when you get to the last page you have written. You will have a much better idea of how to complete the work. You can also, before or after using the previous strategy, ask the characters what they would like to do. Not one of them is going to say, “Leave me in limbo, please!” Go back to the café, the fishing pier, the factory floor, the horse coral and watch them, talk to them. Then ask them what more they would like to say. Let them be honest. Let them tell you what they know they are going to do and let them tell you they’re going to be ok.            

Give them a send-off they deserve. They have given you a full adventure, and plenty of rich escape. After the last line is done, put on the kettle or walk along a stream and think of them in their world, continuing on by themselves. You have given them the skills and backstory to do it. Letting them go isn’t really saying good-bye. You can visit them in your own pages, and maybe, who knows, somewhere in the future, you may open a blank page and there they will be, waiting, thumb out for another ride on your pen.

Events

Tuesday Mornings are Back! Join me for ten weeks of writing and three hours each week that will lift you up and settle your nerves. March 15 – May 17, 2022. 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. EST. Each writer will have the opportunity to bring in a manuscript for peer review using the AWA Method. $500 maureen@maureenbjones.com

Thank You Book Moon & Odyssey Bookshop!

Prompt Photo

Last week a storm snapped off the top of a 100-ft white pine and slammed it down behind my house, pinning the back door shut. Remarkably, nothing was damaged. I now have a giant octopus with 30-ft limbs sprawled across my small patio. The priority was to clear a way for the back door to open. Pulling the loose and splintered branches was like playing pick-up sticks as I chose the easiest ones to reach and pull. I made piles first on one side of the house then the other, dragging the boughs after me like enormous feather dusters. Within two hours I had cleared the back door and assembled several heaps of aligned branches. Two oak saplings were pinned under 6- to 8-inch diameter limbs. These needed rescuing. The pick-up stick game became a more serious question of physics. Without being able to lift the massive limbs, using leverage became the strategy. The two saplings finally sprung free. One nearly returned to upright, the other remains deeply bowed, but no longer weighted. That is as much as I can do until it’s above freezing and I can use the chainsaw to disassemble the attached limbs, separate and move them.

Writing a novel can feel like this as one begins. A flash of an idea lands and the mind branches in all directions, the process of writing, editing, finding an agent, a publisher, all large, weighty, confusing and, for most of us, rather daunting. One part of the mind wants everything to make sense and be orderly. That’s the survival part of the mind. The other part of the mind wants to dig in and grapple with what’s pressing in the story, to go for broke, follow the threads and the heat. That’s the creative part of the mind. Everyone has their own process in managing these two equally important and powerful impulses.

The loose branches I gathered and piled are like the scenes I write first, the ones that help me get to know the characters, the place, the questions that connect everything and create the tension in the story. These can pile up for a bit before I’m ready to tackle the overall structure, which is the trunk of the tree with its multiple compelling branches. This is where plot comes in and serious character development, which includes backstory. Going back and forth between gathering and piling and tackling the core of the narrative isn’t a perfect rhythm. Sometimes the focus on one or the other has all my attention. Sometimes they overlap. In the end, though, I have aligned the scenes, the characters who inhabit them, the arc and pace of the telling, and all the supporting elements like descriptions of place and time. To say this is a messy process is to understate and misrepresent what actually happens. Just like sorting out the tree, it takes full concentration and a recognition that some branches are stuck, and some are surprisingly cooperative. May a tree never topple in your back yard, but I do hope that the novelist in you recognizes and welcomes the exciting arrival of inspiration and the joy of sorting and collecting your own branching narratives.

Events

Thank you Odyssey Bookshop for hosting a reading of Maud & Addie on January 18! Thank you to everyone who joined me! And thank you to Hilary Godwin, who is a skilled and charming interviewer! If you weren’t able to be there, here is the link. And here I am at the Odyssey, signing books.

Prompt Photo

Amazement:  From maze Old English. Overwhelm, confound with sudden surprise or wonder. Stunned, dazed, bewildered. Stupefied, irrational, foolish. Wonderful. Astonished. Overwhelming wonder.

A while ago my life contained enough difficulties to give me serious pause and feel weighed down. I was struggling and found that each day was too clumsy and large to carry. In an almost unconscious rebellion against this state of mind, I decided to start each day by telling myself, “Something amazing will happen today.” The remarkable thing about this artificial and ridiculous bit of homework was that it sort of worked. Something amazing did happen each day. My life wasn’t transformed, and I still had to solve and come to terms with my circumstances. But my little practice helped. I didn’t make the astonishing things happen because they were always going to happen. Amazing things occur all the time all around us. It was the act of noticing that was my part of the equation. My small declaration prepared me to observe and accept. I had to open in order to be more open.

Now when I use the word amazing, I don’t mean miraculous angels sing, or the IRS returns all the taxes I have paid. The universe offers better subtly, sophistication and wit. Wondrous, bewildering, stunning things present themselves constantly. Our reception is key. Sunsets happen frequently, in fact, every single day. Some are spectacular and some are like silk. They’re both incredible.

I began to make a list. One for every day. This list includes a woman walking with a bundle of hay on her back on a sidewalk in Amherst; a cat flicking its tail and then landing it lightly on the nose of another cat; a sign that reads Free at Last Bail Bonds; a child singing “My Girl” in the next aisle of the supermarket; a tiny, jewel green frog showing up every night for a week; a gallon of pale yellow paint, a man fixing my glasses no charge, a pair of Jane Austen socks arriving in the mail.

But life continues, the pandemic arrived and some days even when I try, nothing presents itself. And the mice have found a way in. I’m working on plugging the holes, but in the meantime, I have an active catch and release program. Today was the eleventh mouse who needed to be taken for a ride. I didn’t want to do this chore today. It’s an added problem to solve among so many: a desk piled high and worries multiplying. Finding the right spot is not easy. What do mice dream of? Fields near water, three miles from my house, perhaps a ramshackle building? Here I was caring for another creature with more than a bit of martyrdom and annoyance in my heart. I had forgotten my self-administered advice as an antidote to despair that ‘something extraordinary is going to happen today.”

I freed the mouse on a side road next to a field. When I straightened up and looked around, I noticed a dirt road leading down a hill. At home there was an instruction manual to write, a set of stairs to paint, bookkeeping to reconcile, emails to answer, a novel with characters left mid scene. But the road had just the right curve. I began to walk. Up and over the crest of the hill I found myself in a wide mowed field with soft blue sky overhead. Farther down the hill wooden beehives were stacked and secured for winter. The road ended and fed onto a dirt path. I kept going past farm equipment and through a line of trees to the edge of a small river. The path took me along the bank, past huge trees, brambles, native bittersweet, and milkweed. I followed up and around into a sandy expanse of golden timothy grass, the tiny, dried blossoms catching light like fireflies. And on I went into more trees along the river until I stopped short. The river widened, picked up speed, surging over fallen trees to make eddies and small waterfalls. Ice rimed some of the un-submerged branches and the winter sun glowed up from the depths in its own reflection, framed by the bare trunks of saplings. I was entirely alone with the rhythm and music of the river, its birds and the slight scuttling of winter leaves. I was given back to myself. My better self. If not for the mouse, I never would have walked up and over the hill.

All of this is to say that writing is like this. Following what comes next, trusting the idea of not knowing what might happen, welcoming the unexpected, the strange, the curious, the detailed. Robert Frost said, “No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” We all want to feel something when we read, be taken to the unexpected and be surprised at a new way of seeing. So, here’s to the eleventh mouse! And here’s to you! May you find your own wonder and peace; and continue to follow the rise and curves of your writing path with curiosity and the willingness to be astonished.

Upcoming Events

Zoom in on Tuesday, January 18th at 7 p.m. for a virtual event at the Odyssey Bookshop!

https://www.odysseybks.com/event/maureen-b-jones

Prompt Photo

A few weeks ago I had the thrill of watching and listening to a conversation between Ann Patchett and Louise Erdrich. Both women are formidable writers, and the conversation focused on Louise Erdrich’s latest book, The Sentence, but they are also bookstore owners. Ann Patchett owns Parnassus Books in Nashville Tennessee, and Louise Erdrich owns Birch Bark Books in Minneapolis Minnesota. Who better to offer us a stack of books? As writers, readers and booksellers, they offered their latest suggestions for fabulous reading. As the daylight shrinks, sustain your own writing and inspiration by entering other worlds and listening to other voices. Because I learn about life and how to write by reading, I also offer my own list in this moment of giving thanks to the voices of the first nations of this continent.

Part of our creativity comes from accidentally finding things in our writing and seeing where that takes us.   Louise Erdrich  Interview 11/9/21

Patchett & Erdrich Recommended Reading List:

The Sentence   Louise Erdrich

A Paradise  Hanya Yanagihara

Ministry for the Future  Kim Stanley Robinson

Thank You, Mr. Nixon  Gish Jen

The Blue Flower  Penelope Fitzgerald

Oh William  Elizabeth Strout

Five Tuesdays in Winter  Lily King 

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating   Elizabeth Tova Bailey

The Beatrice Prophecy  Kate DiCamillo

A Thousand Trails Home: Living with Caribou  Seth Kantner

Encounters of the Passage: Inuit Meet the Explorers   Dorothy Eber

1,000 Years of Joys and Sorrows   Ai Weiwei   Chinese History 

My Recommended Reading List:

Novels

Love Medicine   Louise Erdrich   Harper  1989

The Sentence Louise Erdrich Harper 2021

Ceremony Leslie Marmon Silko Penguin Classics 1986

The Woman Who Owned the Shadows  Paula Gunn Allen  Aunt Lute Books  1984

Power  Linda Hogan  W. W. Norton & Co. 1999

House Made of Dawn  N. Scott Momaday Harper Perennial Modern Classics 2018

The Marrow Thieves  Cherie Dimaline DCB 2017

Winter in the Blood  James Welch  Penguin Random House 2008

There There  Tommy Orange  Penguin Random House  2019

The Heartsong of Charging Elk  James Welch   Penguin Random House 2001

Perma Red   Debra Magpie Earling    Blue Hen  2002

Waterlily  Ella Cara Deloria    Bison Books  2009

Crooked Hallelujah  Kelli Jo Ford  Grove Atlantic 2020

The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong  Stephen Graham Jones

Morning Girl  Michael Dorris  New York: Hyperion 1999

Elatsoe  Darcie Little Badger  Levine Querido  2020

Black Sun (Between Earth and Sky)   Rebecca Roanhorse  Gallery/Saga Press 2021

Memoir

Crazy Brave Joy Harjo  W. W. Norton & Co. 2013

Heart Berries   Terese Marie Mailhot Counterpoint 2019

Carry A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land Toni Jensen Penguin 2020

The Education of Augie Merasty A Residential School Memoir Joseph Auguste Merasty Univeristy of Regina Press 2017

The Tao of Raven  An Alaska Memoir  Ernestine Hayes  University of Washington Press 2017

History

“All the Real Indians Died Off” and Other Myths about Native Americans. Boston: Beacon Press, 2016

The Heirs of Columbus  Gerald Vizenor  Wesleyan University Press 1991

This Stretch of River: Lakota, Dakota, & Nakota Responses to the Lewis & Clark Expedition and Bicentennial. Rapid City: Oak Lake Writers’ Society, 2006.

Black Elk Speaks  John Neihardt   Lincoln: Bison Books, 2004

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee   David Treuer  Riverhead Books 2019

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History   S. C. Gwynne  Scribner  2011

Culture

First Nations and Native American Cookbook: Food from North American Tribes  Tim Murphy   Createspace Independent Publishing Platform  2016

Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World  Linda Hogan  W.W. Norton & Co. 2007

Braiding Sweetgrass  Robin Wall Kimmerer  Milkweed Editions 2014

Fools Crow Wisdom and Power  Thomas E. Mails  Millchap Books 2016

Maud & Addie

A small portion of proceeds from this book have been donated to the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre to honor the original and continuing storytellers of the Mi’kmaq Nation and support the survivors of the Shubenacadie Residential School.

Regal House Publishing: Hard copy & Paperback

iPg Independent Publishing Group: Paperback & Ebook

Prompt Photo

On October 3, 2021, I was invited to speak at the end of the Amherst Writers & Artists Professional Development Retreat. Specifically, I was asked to talk about an addition to the essential practices that constitute the AWA Method. Not only do I use this method carefully in every workshop and retreat I lead, I also am the AWA Training Director, teaching people how to use this method as workshop leaders. The addition to the method is one that emerged over the decades that I have been practicing and teaching: the quality of listening.

I can say, without hyperbole that this particular element of the AWA Method has taught me to be more present, more attentive, more receptive, and more compassionate. Here are my remarks on what I mean by listening in an AWA workshop.

While teaching people The Method through more than 50 training sessions, I came to realize that embedded in the five essential practices of the AWA Method is a particular and unique way of listening. This quality of listening should be noticed, examined and emphasized.

Before I do that, I want to tell you that last year, in 2020, I thought the birds around my house sounded louder and their songs were longer. I didn’t really know what I was hearing, but I knew their voices sounded different. I thought maybe it was because I had time to notice their songs in a way I hadn’t before. I did some research. What I learned was that I was wrong and I was right. Around the globe, as human noise diminished, birds didn’t have to shout over our traffic, yard machines, and crowd noise. They could communicate with each other more quietly. Sparrow songs were 27 percent softer. The songs also had more frequency changes, making their communication more effective. Their bandwidth traveled twice as far as it had before. This increase in bandwidth and the changes in the songs themselves improved mating possibilities and sharing information about predators and resources. And because the birds were singing more effectively, I along with other humans could hear the birds four times better and recognize the wider variations in their songs. As Steven Lovatt, in his book Birdsong in a Time of Silence, says, “Finally, the Earth could hear itself think, and the voice of its thought was birdsong.”

In an AWA workshop, we ask ourselves and each other to quiet our inner traffic noise, our busy scattered attention. We calm and still our inner satellite dish, focus it on one voice, and allow ourselves to be receptive to that voice. We witness the writing.

One of the primary needs of every human being is too know they have been heard. All of us who experience the AWA Method, whether after we have shared our own writing or are responding to someone else’s, know the profound feeling of comfort, satisfaction, connection and healing that comes with knowing that what we have expressed has been fully received. Listening is as fundamental to the success of the method as not assuming that the writing is about the writer.

The way we listen in an AWA workshop is unusual. When we listen to others at work or when talking with neighbors, friends or family we often aren’t fully listening. We are hearing, which, on its most clinical level, is accidental, involuntary, passive and involves a basic connection between our ears and our brains. Even in a conversation, we might only be hearing the other person because we are distracted or taking in information for the purpose of providing an answer.

The act of listening, however, is focused, voluntary, intentional, and involves the mind and the body. It involves concentration and an effort to understand meaning. We listen to learn and comprehend.

But in an AWA workshop, our listening goes further and deeper. We are required to practice a different quality of listening. When we listen to someone’s writing, we need to adjust our inner alignment to accept what is being given and accept it at its own value.

We need to adopt the “Willing suspension of disbelief,” a phrase created by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the late 1800s. What he means by his phrase is the act of letting go of our internal noise and critics. When we enter a theater or even turn on the television, we suspend our own lives and live within the created universe of the story on stage. That is the beginning of how we listen in an AWA workshop.

We listen openly, without assumptions, expectations or judgment. We also listen by leaving ourselves behind as we enter the created world of what we are listening to. We don’t attach our experiences to this new experience of the writing. We accept it as it is offered.

We listen for the effect it has on us. We listen for what engages us, what surprises us, what becomes vivid for us. We listen for how the writing is created.

The birdsong phenomenon and Lovatt’s quote are very much about the Sixth Practice that the AWA Board of Directors has voted to add to the AWA Method: The Quality of Listening.

From the writer’s point of view, their experience should be exactly that described in this poem by John Fox, founder of the Institute for Poetic Medicine

When Someone Deeply Listens to You

When someone deeply listens to you
it is like holding out a dented cup
you’ve had since childhood
and watching it fill with
cold, fresh water.
When it balances on top of the brim,
you are understood.
When it overflows and touches your skin,
you are loved.
When someone deeply listens to you,
the room where you stay
starts a new life
and the place where you wrote
your first poem
begins to glow in your mind’s eye.
It is as if gold has been discovered!
When someone deeply listens to you,
your bare feet are on the earth
and a beloved land that seemed distant
is now at home within you.

                              John Fox, Founder of The Institute for Poetic Medicine

I’ll leave you with these the final words that belong to the one who listened to us first:

Now poems fall from your lips like rain,
and I listen, drinking in.

These are lines from the poem “Three Sonnets” by Pat Schneider

Maud & Addie

A small portion of proceeds from this book have been donated to the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre to honor the original and continuing storytellers of the Mi’kmaq Nation and support the survivors of the Shubenacadie Residential School.

Regal House Publishing: Hard copy & Paperback

iPg Independent Publishing Group: Paperback & Ebook

Prompt Photo

Who are you talking to? It was the question I would get asked when I was small. So I learned not to talk out loud, but to keep my stories inside. Then I learned to write. But the thing is, I’m still talking to someone invisible, someone mysterious, and especially on a walk or while driving the car, I can still easily find myself making up a story out loud.

Recently, the question of who are we writing for arose in a conversation. Some writers talked about imagining someone ‘across the desk’ or writing to a friend. Another writer talked about writing to a group of readers in a variety of libraries or reading rooms. I marveled at these writers being so clear about their audience. And I wondered at how ‘grown up’ they were to imagine real people reading their work, so that the creation began with that exterior, outward imagining. When I said that I write for myself first, the other writers said, “Well, journal writing is personal writing and very valuable.” But that’s not what I was talking about.

I think that all of our stories no matter what the ratio is of memory to imagination are stories that begin and echo in the deep curved walls of our internal caves. Like handprints at Lascaux, our stories affirm that we are alive, that we have a voice that we can still hear, and that we can shape the characters and the scenes that travel far beyond where we are standing and experiencing in that moment. As a child, the answer to the question was complicated, which is why I could never answer. I wasn’t talking to anyone. I was talking to everyone. I was talking to myself. I was talking to someone who believed every word I said and felt every emotion of the characters. I was talking to a spirit who said, “Yes, and there’s more.” To this day when I write, I picture no listener anywhere. I simply see the people in the stories and hear them speak. I walk in the woods or down the avenues where they walk and sit at their kitchen tables. I vanish from this world and travel in time and space.

I offer my own creative process, not because I think it is superior or results in better craft, but to give permission to others that there are infinite ways to set about creating art. Books are full of strategies and advice, much of it very fine. Everyone’s perception of their creative process is unique to them, and it is precious, it is the life raft we build, step onto and trust when we need to set off from shore. Every artist has to hug their own genius and speak to it even if it means that someone asks, “What on earth are you doing?”  

Maud & Addie

A small portion of proceeds from this book have been donated to the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre to honor the original and continuing storytellers of the Mi’maq Nation and support the survivors of the Shubenacadie Residential School.

Regal House Publishing: Hard copy & Paperback

iPg Independent Publishing Group: Paperback & Ebook

Prompt Photo

For the past eight years I have taught a two-week, summer poetry class for high school students. Every summer I watched them interact, share jokes and music, the bolder ones including the quieter ones, the romantics entrancing the skeptics. Last year, because of Covid, it didn’t happen. This year we met on Zoom. And this year I made assumptions. I thought that because these students had been learning online for the past year they would be removed and distant from the experience. I knew not to question why their cameras were turned off, whether for accommodations or Zoom fatigue. Even so, I resolved to give them the best writing workshop I could.

I know that teens can be skittish and moody and, I assumed, more easily discouraged. The young writers who showed up through the ether were geographically dispersed and economically and culturally diverse. I referred to all of them as they. They wrote with me every day for three hours over two weeks. When the bandwidth failed, they left the class and came back in to re-set the signal. Every time.

One student in particular had a very shaky signal. Their voice crackled and skipped. I asked them to read their pieces again. We worked with chat and emails. Sometimes they went silent for long stretches because the best they could do was to listen in and get what they could. But I always knew they were there. Sometimes when they read, so much street noise punctuated their poems, that I pictured them in a second-story kitchen at an intersection that housed a fire station, a metro stop, a bodega and a playground. Every once in a while the signal was strong enough for the camera to come on and I got a glimpse of a kid with thick curly hair, bright eyes, headphones on, and a look of pure concentration.

The poems were straight from between the shoulder blades, between sensation and meaning. I was hurtled and lifted and stilled. I touched orange peels, bumpy roads, wet bathing suits and small wrists. These writers knew they needed to write, and not even the Internet was going to get in their way. They listened to each other and cheered.

On the last day, at the end of the three hours, I had to click “End Meeting.” I have done this in other workshops hundreds of times with the strange sensation of an instantly closing door. But this time it was a surreal vanishing trick. We waved and waved again, saying “Thank You!!” “Good-bye!!” And then they were gone.  I did not know I would cry so hard when the screen went dark. I still hear them. Their poems and their responses to each other made the two weeks an exquisite illumination. 

Upcoming Events

Four-Day Writing Retreat! August 10 – 13, 2021 Hawley, Massachusetts. Let the rolling hills, the evening swifts, the quiet woods, and the excellent organic meals restore your inspiration and spirit. We will write with abandon and listen with respect. All writing interests and experience are welcome. Seven participants maximum; separate bedrooms; vaccination required. $850 All spots currently filled.

Weekly Writing Workshops Resume September 13th

Monday evenings: 6:30 – 9:00; Tuesday Mornings: 9:30 – 12:30; Thursday evenings: 6:30 – 9:30; Friday mornings: 9:30 – 12:30

Maud & Addie

On June 10th, Maud & Addie came home to cheers in Halifax, Nova Scotia through the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.

Stay tuned for more readings and events with Maud & Addie!

A small portion of proceeds from this book have been donated to the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre to honor the original and continuing storytellers of the Mi’maq Nation and support the survivors of the Shubenacadie Residential School.

Regal House Publishing: Hard copy & Paperback

iPg Independent Publishing Group: Paperback & Ebook

Prompt Photo

I had the privilege of writing with a group of middle school students recently. As soon as the two leaders of the group began their Power Point presentation on plot, I knew I was going to learn something. According to these two intrepid writers, “Plot is about making a promise to the reader.”

I have been thinking about that ever since. I like to think of plot as a series of questions that get answered or sometimes don’t. I never considered that by presenting a question at the start of a story, that I was promising anything at all. But that’s me as a writer in my free-range habitat of seeing where characters lead me. As a reader, in the hands of a hopefully trustworthy narrator, I would have to agree that at the outset of a story some kind of pact is made between writer and reader. After all, when we finish a book, we often use words like ‘fulfilling’ and ‘satisfying.’ That sounds like a promise made good.

So what exactly are we promising? I think that depends on the questions that get asked. Are we promising that the murderer is caught? That the jilted lover finds solace? That the laborer’s anguish is relieved? Those would fall into the category of happy endings, which certainly can feel nice, however, art is about life, and life is not tidy or simple or always sweet. It seems to me that the promise is about letting the characters reveal themselves as fully as possible to the reader. I don’t mean that every character is transparent; that would be no fun! But each character should have depth, and be grappling with the messiness of living. The promise is that whatever tension is set at the beginning of the story will be dismantled and examined, proven, disproven, reconstructed or dissipated throughout. In other words, the promise will be not only made good, but revised and renewed through better understanding as the characters examine it. We readers know full well when we have arrived somewhere new when we get to the last page. And that is a promise that’s as good as its word.

Upcoming Events

Four-Day Writing Retreat! August 10 – 13, 2021 Hawley, Massachusetts. Let the rolling hills, the evening swifts, the quiet woods, and the excellent organic meals restore your inspiration and spirit. We will write with abandon and listen with respect. All writing interests and experience are welcome. Seven participants maximum; separate bedrooms; vaccination required. $850

Maud & Addie

On June 10th, Maud & Addie came home to cheers in Halifax, Nova Scotia through the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.

Stay tuned for more readings and events with Maud & Addie!

A small portion of proceeds from this book have been donated to the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre to honor the original and continuing storytellers of the Mi’maq Nation and support the survivors of the Shubenacadie Residential School.

Regal House Publishing: Hard copy & Paperback

iPg Independent Publishing Group: Paperback & Ebook

Prompt Photo