I have been refurbishing my kitchen cabinets. No small feat, given they were built by hand in the 1940s by someone who apparently enjoyed eyeballing the measurements. One of the issues was the top facings that attach to the ceiling. For some reason the ends of these structures were not closed off.
Simultaneously, I have been teaching a flash fiction course to high school students. They were struggling with their endings. “Don’t we all?” I said, to which I received blank looks. I suggested that endings are over-rated. But most readers need some sense of landing or further direction.
The cats in my house love the open-ended nature of the empty cabinets. They had free range in the upper levels of the shelving, leaping from one gap to the next. The students, however, wanted better resolution. We all got back to work.
To solve my cabinet problem, I went to the hardware store and, without the proper vocabulary, described my problem. A solemn man in suspenders listened without blinking then said, “Soffits.” I said yes, knowing we weren’t talking about exactly the same thing, but did have the same concept. Endings are tricky like that: How to close off a running leap, a character on a trajectory. The answer is to not close off the story completely or maybe offer surprise. When the students read their endings, they all had breathing room, a bit of ventilation for the reader to consider. My cabinet ‘soffits’ are not airtight either. Their endings leave just a bit of mystery for the cats.
Upcoming Events
Maud & Addie has been selected by the Children’s Book Council for inclusion in their upcoming Kids Choice Awards! If you know any kids who love to read adventure tales, please pass the word! Voting is open until August 22nd. Only kids can vote!
When I was in college, a journalism professor gave an assignment to keep a journal. Not a radical idea, but the further instructions were to choose one subject and keep to it throughout the semester. The professor gave us her own example of living in China on a year-long assignment, during which her father died. She couldn’t go home, couldn’t be with her family, couldn’t share her grief with anyone. So she kept a journal for one year in which every day she wrote something about her father. It was her only way to honor him, grieve him, and keep him close. We students, of course, could choose any topic. I was surprised to find the limitation of one subject to be very reassuring. It was doable. My empty page did not have to, should not, include the universe. The journal pages became small, strong structures that held me to a focus and let me run crazy within the page dimensions. This is the function of form, whether in poetry or prose. Experimentation with form is always invited, and relinquishing ourselves to boundaries can allow a different kind of independence.
But over the years I forgot this lesson. Even as I offer form in my own workshops, I often feel clumsy and inept in the face of a sonnet or the strictures of flash fiction. And then my dear friend, Jan Haag, who leads writing workshops in Sacramento, offered a 30-day version of my professor’s assignment. Every day, four lines. No need for more. Now, my friend did not specify that it had to be one subject, but I chose to combine the original journal keeping idea with this current journey. I decided to have a conversation with a very important person in my life. The four lines became a support or scaffolding, not a restriction. They became a conversation the You and I could finally have. As a result, 30, four-line poems express aspects of my chosen subject. And the thing about this way of writing is that it becomes a meditation, a tight lens, and a close examination of someone’s way of speaking, the way they licked their spoon, the thickness of their hair, the bitterness or joy as they walked away or toward, or the way they pointed to a red winged blackbird and said, ‘Summer will come again.’
Upcoming Events
Maud & Addie remains a finalist, no gold, silver or bronze in the Foreword Reviews best juvenile fiction awards. Thank you for your crossed fingers! The books that did win are beautiful creations: The Beatryce Prophecy, Tiger Skin Rug, and Oddity. I am proud to be in such company!
This summer I will be teaching a Flash Fiction course for high school students at Smith College. After which, I just might give myself time to work on the second Maud & Addie book as well as my adult novel Slide Show.
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I was raking the leaves yesterday, clearing away the decayed vestiges of last year’s foliage even as this year’s leaves flaunt their newly minted green. The idea of a tidy forest floor is actually an oxymoron. No one rakes in the woods. And, as usually happens when my hands are occupied with a physical task, my mind went on its merry way somewhere else. I was imagining the decomposition of the leaves, and the busy activity that happens underground, connection upon connection, and the phrase “Mycorrhizal fungi mutualism” surfaced. A subterranean world came alive with a vast network of connections multiplying into the gazillions. Connections, information, sustenance, and mutual assistance for survival. So busy! So purposeful! And so dependably trusting. Even in a one-liter potted houseplant, one kilometer of these fine fungal filaments can be present to assist the plant’s growth with access to water and nutrients. What on earth (pun intended) does this have to do with writing? I think our brains are like the Mycorrhizal fungi if we allow them to be. We have been taught to make sense, which is necessary for survival. We need to communicate our need for food, safety, warmth, shelter, comfort. We need to be clear and direct to manage healthy relationships. But in our creative minds we need a vast organism that willingly, trustingly, makes connections out of random bits of knowledge, experience and sensations when we first begin to write. Knowing exactly where we’re going takes the fun out of tunneling, surfacing, and tunneling more. Our memories and our imaginations work in tandem. They, like mycorrhizal fungi and most of earth’s plants, have a mutualism that forms the foundation of creative inspiration. Building connections and free associations is how we make meaning, which is an organic cousin to making sense. Creating a metaphor requires going deep, letting the detritus and debris become fertile. By roaming and excavating, committing to the deep nutrients of our imaginations and memories we invite vibrancy and a living, green voice to our pages. We are sprung from within.
Upcoming Events
Winners for the Foreword Review Best Books of 2021 to be announced in June
Maud & Addie is a finalist for Middle Grade Books! Stay tuned for news and keep your fingers crossed!!
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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.
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.”
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.
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
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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!
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Painting by Gordon K. Grant. Currently at the Ventura CA Post Office
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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!
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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.
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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!
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 writingand 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
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.
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.
Sometimes you write things
you don’t want to.
You want your pen to move
in a different direction, but
you don’t have the energy,
or the focus, or the strength
of character to keep it in its
track, so you let it loose,
say Don’t go far in a half-hearted
voice and watch the pen
run off into the under-growth
and start scratching. You
know something is going
to get dug up. Something
you’ll want to get off
your hands later, something
that has hot, red eyes.
But it’s too late, ink is
getting spilled.
