Tag Archives: writing

The Origami Penis

Posted on May 27, 2014 | 1 comment

Disclaimer: there will be hardly any origami, and no male genitalia available for viewing or download in this post.

Origami fun

The “origami penis” phrase arose in a meeting of the New River Writers Project, when one of our members mentioned that his life is “too boring to blog about.”

No, some of us countered, your life is  not boring. Tell us about your eccentric clients! (I shall only reveal that he is a handsome fella of a certain age whose living demands he have extensive public contact. Not literal contact. Get your mind out of the gutter!)

The blog would have to be anonymous of course, someone added. You couldn’t reveal where you actually live. That’s true, he nodded. He paused. “I could call it the Handyman of Love,” he said.

Vulnerable

Vulnerable (Photo credit: S.H.CHOW)

We howled and moved on to the critiques, one of which was for a writer who’s hesitant about starting a blog without having at least a dozen posts ready to go. Another member joked that she didn’t really want to know what anyone else thought and would she have to receive comments on her blog? It was at this point that I slipped into writerly observation mode.

Ten of us were circled around a table; we all have stories in various stages of “polish” and professionalism; we write for a variety of reasons; we range in age from under-thirty to over-sixty.

But the humor within which we conceal-revealed our concerns led me to guess that we all share a worry that maybe we’re not unique enough, not literary enough, not funny enough, not interesting enough. Is this because we’re not in NYC? Because we don’t have MFAs from prestigious writing programs? Why do we think our lives don’t meet the “interesting-enough” criteria?

Spinning Tanoura

Spinning Tanoura (Photo credit: puthoOr photOgraphy)

Robert Boswell noted, in the Taos workshop I reference here, that writers must steal ruthlessly from their own lives. Writing is an ever-spinning dance: between arrogance (sitting down and writing my stories is worth the time and energy and money!), and humility (if I want anyone to read my stories, I need critiques of my drafts). Sometimes the whirl makes me dizzy. I am a Goddess! vs. I am a sh*t-shoveler in the lowest circle of hell. And who am I to tell anyone else what they should or shouldn’t do?

I’m betting this is not a surprise to anyone who undertakes a creative endeavor. And as I write this, I’m thinking sheesh, so WHAT, everyone knows this, shut up already.

connection

But the responses I receive to my words surprise and humble me, and that’s the thing: when we don’t share our creative acts, we don’t know what connections we’ve missed.  The what-ifs are infinite. Every kind word suppressed because I felt self-conscious, every deleted phrase, every un-remarked-upon link between X and Y: each of these might have opened a whole other path to venture down. Not necessarily a better path, or a worse path, but certainly one with more connection.

Why do we shy away from those connections? I have found that people, on the whole, tend toward decency and kindness. Those who don’t are great “testimony” for our writerly selves. Tell your stories!

That fellow-writer with a boring life? He speculated about making origami penises as part of a handyman of love business and sent us all into a borderline-hysterical orbit of giggling. He inspired my words here. Connections galore!

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Time: is it a sandwich?

Posted on May 13, 2014 | 5 comments

My 13 y.o. waxed somewhat rhapsodic on our ride home from his cello lesson last week. What if time didn’t matter, he said. What if everything is happening all at once, and time doesn’t move forward like we think it does but instead is a big thick layer (a Dagwood sandwich sprang to my mind) and time travel wouldn’t take us forward or backward but just to the other layers that we’re in.

I’m not sure where he gets these ideas, tho’ it’s a good bet that his leave-no-crumbs wolf-down consumption of nonfiction helps. And Engineer Hubby hooks up podcasts about science on road trips and that helps, too. But I never, and I mean NEVER, thought about what time might be like when I was a child. I never think about it now. Except when he’s talking and then my little mind gets blown.

I think about people and why they do what they do and what would happen if they did something else and how could someone get away with shoplifting or embezzling or murder and how hard it would be to go into hiding from the mafia, and alternative outcomes for country song story lines. Usually all of these jumble together in my brain while I shower.

There are plenty of theories and studies about creativity; environment certainly has a lot to do with it, and being supported by someone who cares about you is also important (I have an informal theory that every artist has had at least one teacher who said YES! to whatever they tried) but ultimately: we are unique collections of molecules. And the organization of those molecules into the human form, the human brain, follows a regular DNA pattern book, a pattern book with a lot of variations but not an infinite number of combinations. Why do some of our pattern books lead us to think about time instead of about people? Or is the we-are-molecules-and-an-electrical-system concept too limiting, failing as it does to account for the soul, or spirit?

It has taken me most of my adult life to glom onto the fact that others are Different From Me. Profoundly, completely different. That not everyone cleans their dishes before going to bed. Or washes their sheets once a week. These dish-in-sink, clean-sheet-slackers appear to be happy, healthy, content.

Photo by Mickey Destro

Photo by Mickey Destro

These days, as I do said dishes and load aforementioned sheets into the washer, I find myself thinking: Andrea Barrett doesn’t do this. Lionel Shriver doesn’t spend this much time on domestic duties. Writers must write which means dust bunnies will be free to frolic and breed. Maybe, just maybe, if I imagine hard enough and write long enough, I’ll be able to release my inner dirty-dish-lover, and she in turn will surprise me by creating that which I cannot yet imagine: a sandwich of words, comprised of pastrami particles and swiss cheese holes and mustardy molecules, the crumbs left for the ants.

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Fear and salvation

Posted on April 27, 2014 | 6 comments

Unknown-1I am heading to a week’s training in the Amherst Writers and Artists writing workshop method. Aka the Pat Schneider workshop method.  We’ll be working with Schneider’s book Writing Alone and with Others. I cannot recommend this highly enough! Buy it today if you can! The “Five Essential Affirmations” she articulates in this text resonate deeply with me:

1. Everyone has a strong, unique voice.

2. Everyone is born with creative genius.

3. Writing as an art form belongs to all people, regardless of economic class or educational level.

4. The teaching of craft can be done without damage to a writers original voice or artistic self-esteem.

5. A writer is someone who writes.

Ah. That last one. A writer is someone who writes.

I am afraid I have not been writing. I have been fussing with stuff in my house, liberating books and tchotchkes to create a clear writing space.

I have not been writing.  I have been telling myself everything else is more important than my writing: the college visits for the older son, the dog walks, the volunteer work for my faith community, the exercise to whittle the extra five pounds from my belly.

I have not been writing for a couple of months, since I gave a very rough (as in, splintery!) draft of a story to a writers group without a clear request for the type of feedback that would be most supportive for my writing.

Unsurprisingly, the feedback was uneven; there were positive and negative responses. Somewhat surprisingly, the less-than-positive responses really got under my skin. I ranted and raged and cried and whimpered my way through Julia Cameron‘s recommended three longhand “Morning Pages” for a couple of weeks. Then for another couple of weeks I donned the TaskMasterLesley hat in my Morning Pages: you know full well how to handle this! Buck up! But I can’t, I whined, scrawling my heart’s distress across the pages. I just can’t write anymore. I’m dried up. I’m barren. I’m a wasteland.

You can imagine the gaping abyss of terror that my squirrel brain has come up with. In fact, if you’ve read any of my previous posts, you are probably overly familiar with my squirrel brain.

But this morning, seven weeks since that critique, my Morning Pages delivered me to a new place. My squirrel brain … bored me. When it started its high-pitched chatter, today I simply noted: h’mm, there’s that squirrel, desperate for nuts. And I strode forward past the tree it perched in. I did not engage in a loud chattery chirrupy shouting match while flicking my tail in wild anxiety and circling the tree trunk like a maniac.

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I wound up in a clearing wherein I laid out a plan for how to find the sandpaper to begin to smooth my story’s splinters. And furthermore, the Morning Pages said, look at how much you’ve written! You’ve written your Morning Pages every day. It’s whiney writing, non-brilliant writing, repetitive writing, prosaic writing.

But it’s writing.

Saved again.

 

 

 

 

 

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