Newsletter
October 2010
Dear Writing Friends:
I am sitting on my front porch in the rocking chair, notebook on lap, feet perched on a table. It is the first day of fall weather in Austin, and it is heaven to be outside. In the background, the roar, creak, and bang of construction continue from dawn until dusk. The city is tearing up the streets of our neighborhood. This racket is my constant companion.
My personal myth is that I am sensitive to noise. I have no filter for it. I remember when I was in high school trying to do my homework while my brother cranked Sesame Street reruns in the next room. I thought my brain would explode. One day I slinked off to my bedroom and closed my door, and thereafter my mother declared a zone of quiet around me. Grades mattered in our house, and I quickly learned everyone would leave me alone while I was studying. Sometimes I think the whole charade of getting a Ph.D. was an excuse to sit in a quiet library, year after year, by myself. I have always craved silence and solitude.
As I’m developing my coaching practice, I’m integrating sitting meditation into my one-on-one work with clients. It brings us into the present moment together, keeping us mindful and listening to one another. A few weeks ago I had a client come at 8 a.m., normally a peaceful time of day in my writing studio. But when we sat down to meditate, the clang of construction work started revving up for the day.
“We’ll be sitting with a bit of noise,” I said calmly. I had been successfully sitting with the commotion all week and was rather proud of myself for my newfound ability to focus. And then, just as I rang the bell for us to begin sitting, the gardener and his crew showed up, and we were blasted by leaf blowers and lawnmowers right outside the window.
I immediately began rehearsing in my head the litany of apologies I would offer my client when we were finished sitting. He has terrible timing, I imagined myself saying. I would tell her about the day last spring when I carried a cup of tea and my notebook to my front porch and just as I was sinking into my writing, he appeared with his truck and trailer. It was a funny story, I thought. I jumped up and fled to a coffee shop, hauling my notebook, computer, and a stack of books. I am often on the run from noise.
When the gardeners finished, I was relieved. The room was still and we could hear birdsong outside the window. Peace at last. And then the city workers began to tear up the street. Bang, bang, bang, bang. A loud, rhythmic force tore into the concrete. I’ll need to find office space somewhere else, I thought. This isn’t working.
I tried to settle on my breath, but remained agitated and worried about my client. She was paying for this. And then I remembered something I’d read by the avant-garde musician, John Cage, whose work I had studied in graduate school. “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise,” he wrote. “When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.” I thought I should give it a try. Rather than wishing it away, perhaps I could sit and listen to the blasting and banging. Anyway, you couldn’t escape it. At times it was so loud, it shook the house. I could feel it in my belly, and it reminded me that sound is vibration. It’s physical. At one point the thought ran through my head that I could use this as material. Wasn’t it my job as a writer to be present to the world and report back?
After twenty minutes, I rang the bell and sitting time was over. My client blinked her eyes a few times and looked up at me.
“That was great,” she said. I nodded my head in agreement and told her I had spent the first five minutes apologizing in my head.
“I barely heard the noise through my thoughts,” she said, laughing. She had been practicing Zen for over twenty years and had a sense of humor about the way the mind traps us. I appreciated that. I told her how it was for me to sit and feel the house shaking around me, my whole body jolted by the pounding of the street.
A week later another client came early in the morning and we sat again with the construction crew as background noise. Another gardener showed up, down the street this time, and the suburban music of lawnmowers and leaf blowers echoed through the neighborhood again. When we were finished meditating, I said something about learning to sit with the noise.
“I love that sound,” she told me with a far-off look in her eye. At this point I wasn’t sure who was teaching whom.
The construction crew continues to arrive every day at 7:00 a.m. sharp. They take a break for lunch and then continue until dark. I recognize the guys now, the dark-skinned man with the long, black sideburns who holds up the Stop sign every day, and the older gentleman who parks his big white truck at the corner. They wave at me when I pass them on my daily walk. I feel self-conscious in my privilege, in my life of relative leisure, working at home on my own schedule. I work hard, but they work harder and longer, and they don’t complain. They show me what work really is and I get down to it.
I’m accustomed to the noise now and the presence of the men moving about the street. I’ll miss them when they move onto the next job. It’s lonely here in the house, and they are good companions.
Last Sunday, I serendipitously picked up the latest issue of the New Yorker. It was sitting in front of me when I sat down to drink my tea on Sunday morning. Inside I found an article about John Cage (I love this kind of synchronicity). “Did Cage love noise?” the writer wondered. “Or did he merely make peace with it?” It seems that Cage was agitated by the sounds coming from his next-door neighbors, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and asked them if they would remove their speakers from the wall. This made me laugh. “But,” the writer continued, “he trained himself to find noise interesting rather than distracting.”
I don’t know that I’d willingly walk into a construction site and sit down for the concert, but coming face to face with my noise demon has taught me about staying present to things I find uncomfortable—climate change, for example. As writers, and as good citizens, it’s important to turn and face unpleasantness in order to be better witnesses to our world.
This month’s quotation is a poem by Jane Kenyon.
The Visit
The talkative guest has gone,
and we sit in the yard
saying nothing. The slender moon
comes over the peak of the barn.
The air is damp, and dense
with the scent of honeysuckle. . . .
The last clever story has been told
and answered with laughter.
With my deep sleeping self I met
my obligations, but now I am aware
of the silence, and your affection,
and the delicate sadness of dusk.
Writing topics:
A memory of sound
A memory of silence
Monday Night Practice Group continues. My intentions are to hold a space for us to practice together, creating a community around meditation and writing practice, and to provide a structure that will feed our writing throughout the week. It is a deeply peaceful and pleasurable time. If you live in Austin, and you’ve studied with me before, I hope you’ll join us. You’ll be amazed what it does for your writing and your life. The schedule for the remainder of the fall is as follows:
Session II
Dates: October 25, November 1, 8, and 15.
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
Location: Congregation Beth Israel, 3908 Shoal Creek
Cost: $50
Session III
Dates: November 22 and 29, December 6 and 13
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
Location: Congregation Beth Israel, 3908 Shoal Creek
Cost: $50
In Process Coaching:
I have not yet launched my new website or formally announced my coaching business – that’s coming in the new year – but I am seeing clients and a have a few spaces open for the fall.
If you have a desire to write, but haven’t found a way in, or you are writing but want to go deeper,
If you see writing as a way of connecting to the world, something larger than production and publication,
If you understand writing as a process and a path and that progress doesn’t necessarily move neatly from Point A to Point B,
If you have an established meditation practice or other mindfulness practice, or you would like to establish one in conjunction with writing,
I’d love to work with you. My process is intuitive and effective. Using meditation, writing practice, deep reading, and close listening as our tools, I take my clients from naked writing practice to fully dressed, publication-ready work. If you’re interested, give me a holler.
I think that’s it for now.
My best to each of you.
Saundra
June 2010
Dear Writing Friends:
A few years ago when my daughter went off to elementary school, giving me eight hours of uninterrupted time five days a week, I thought I was in heaven. Finally, a quiet house with plenty of free hours to work on my book, and maybe even some extra time to work on other projects—short stories I’d written long ago that needed editing, essays that had been running through my mind for years. Of course I would need time to eat, bathe, exercise, see the dentist, and get my hair cut. So really, when you got down to it, most days I had about four hours to actually work. And then there was the matter of structure. When would I write? Shouldn’t I meditate first to set the tone for the day? If I went to the dentist first thing in the morning, how would I transition back to my studio? And what about friends? Wasn’t it important to nurture my relationships? And so on. It’s a great privilege to make your own days, but it’s also a pain in the ass.
Weekday mornings unfold like this: If I’m lucky I wake at 6:30 to the sound of my alarm. Most days, however, I’m jolted awake by the sound of my daughter whining, “Mommy, Mommy, Mooooooommmmmmmy.” At which point I haul myself downstairs and flop face down on her bed until she requests nourishment. The minute my feet hit the floor, however, the dogs start barking to go out. I open the back door for them and go to the kitchen. But before I can open the refrigerator, they’re back and barking for food. To reduce the noise level, I feed them first and then get my daughter’s breakfast, which I bring to her in bed along with her homework (yes, I let my daughter do her homework in bed in the morning). I make her lunch, pack her snacks, fill her water bottle, go back to retrieve her homework, put that in the backpack, and then drag Shira from the bed to get dressed. Most days I pick out her outfits and bring her her toothbrush to get her out the door on time. I have a lot at stake in getting her out the door on time. The earlier she gets out, the more time I have to write. I’m exhausted by the time she leaves.
This is what the next part of my day looks like: I walk Shira to the door, kiss her good-bye, and send her off to school with Steve, closing and locking the door behind me. If I haven’t eaten, I prepare something quickly, usually a smoothie, because liquid meals save time. And then, because I am so, so, so tired, I make a cup of tea and go to my studio to read. I’m a writer, so I get to read. Plus, it feels completely decadent, especially if I bypass the studio and take the tea and the book back to bed. My next order of business is stretching, because I’m getting creakier with age, and then sitting. I usually give myself a time limit on all this and tell myself I can do whatever I want as long as I’m writing by 9:30.
Here is where I get into trouble: Sometimes . . . Okay, most days I bypass the book and sit down in front my computer to check my e-mail. I subscribe to MediaBistro’s morning news feed and I justify taking time to read it because it’s work-related. Then I go back to e-mail, which almost inevitably leads me to Facebook, because I can’t resist seeing the comments to my status updates on the page itself. Plus you can see how many people gives you the thumbs up and thus start your day with a little ego boost. While I’m there, of course I have to hit “Home” and see what all my friends are up to. I like to be a generous participant in the social networking world, so I post some links to my homepage, make some comments, and go back to check my profile. And then I check my e-mail again. It’s now 9:00. Needless to say, I usually get to work after my appointed time. I might be only fifteen minutes late, but I have a lot of guilt and shame about it. I know I’ve been wasting time—my time.
A few weeks ago I began seeing a new life coach, Sonya Davis, owner of Business the Feminine Way, with the intention of connecting the dots of my writing life. To my horror, we began with my schedule.
“My sense is that you need more structure,” Sonya told me. “I want you to go home and block out the entire summer on iCalendar and color code it.” We were sitting at her desk and she swiveled her computer around to show me hers: lovely blocks of time rendered in pink, blue, purple, red, and green boxes.
“Sure,” I said, feigning cheerfulness. “That sounds great.” Although truthfully, the thought of sitting down in front of my computer and carving out my time into little boxes felt like going to prison. Wasn’t this why I had jumped off the tenure track, opted out of an office job? I wanted my freedom. I wanted long, unstructured days to write, to walk at Town Lake, and to sit in a coffee shop and dream. Of course I wasn’t getting that much done staring out the window at Starbucks. Plus I had paid for the session, which made me think I should at least try it.
That night, after Shira went to bed, I pulled out my computer and began. It took me an hour to plot my first week, in part because I didn’t know you could copy blocks of time the same way you can copy words and paragraphs in Microsoft Word. Also, I couldn’t decide how much time I should give to each activity. I spent a lot of time editing my boxes, giving myself fifteen minutes more in one place and then taking it from another. I also had to figure in transportation time. It was not a whole lot of fun. But as I was color-coding my activities, I remembered seeing in Sonya’s calendar a few blocks of time marked, “flow/receptivity.” I wasn’t sure what that meant to Sonya, but I had an idea of what an hour of flow time might look like for me: reading something inspiring, writing practice, meditation, a walk if I needed it. I looked at my week and blocked out flow time every morning in little pink boxes. Some days I gave myself an hour. Twice a week, I gave myself two hours. And I scheduled my writing time directly afterwards.
On the first day of my new schedule I sent Shira off to school and took my tea to my studio. It was 7:50 and my “flow time” began at 8:00, enough time to check my e-mail. I was about to get on Facebook, when I stopped myself. I had reserved time to do the things that soothed my spirit and would feed my writing. I got off the computer, put on my tennis shoes, and went for a walk. It was Monday morning and I hadn’t had much time for exercise over the weekend. Plus, while the afternoons are heating up here, the mornings are still cool. I wanted to take advantage of the fresh air. I wandered through my neighborhood noticing the pink oleander trees that bloomed since I last got out and the white buds on the magnolias. As I turned the corner from Shoal Creek to Great Oaks Trail, which as you would expect is lined with live oaks, the rest of my day unfolded in my mind. I had two work periods on my calendar. I would fill one with my to-do list – forms that needed to filled out, essays I wanted to submit – and the other with book work. I went home, stretched, sat meditation, and at 10:00 I sat down at my desk and got to it.
When I met with Sonya later that day, I told her about my success. Her blue eyes sparkled. “When you honor your commitments to yourself,” she said, “your life blooms.”
It seems so elementary, the line drawn in the proverbial sand, etched on the computer screen. A simple boundary. It’s easy to waste time plugged into the Internet, but it draws energy away from my inner life, from the stillness that feeds my writing. It’s not that I never check my e-mail anymore or get caught on Facebook. But when the day begins and I see that I’ve set aside time for myself, I honor it. It remains to be seen how it will affect my writing. For now the boost in self-esteem is enough.
This month’s quotation:
A dishonest yes is a no to yourself.
Byron Katie, Question Your Thinking, Change the World.
Writing Topic:
Weekday mornings unfold like this
I wish you all a wonderful summer. In Process will take a break until Labor Day, when I will announce my new
business. I’m very excited to be offering individual and group coaching this
fall as well as other services that you’ll be able to read about on my new
website. I’d love to hear from you about your needs as writers and how I might
be able to assist. And don’t forget to send me your publication announcements
and other achievements so I can post them to our growing community.
My best to each of you.
Saundra
Laura Kooris has had a quite a month. Her article, "Jim
Henry, Texas Oil Baron," was published in Pressing Times, a
newsletter by the Olive Oil Source. You can see it online at http://www.oliveoilsource.com/article/jim-henry-texas-oil-baron.
Laura’s poem, "The Way Away," was published in the 2010 volume of di-verse-city, and she received two honorable mentions from the
Austin Poetry Society Awards. Lastly, her poem, "Ballast," was picked
up for the Melbourne, Australia magazine, Frame Lines.
And in case I haven’t bombarded you
with the announcement already, babble.com
published my piece, “How to Entertain Your Child While Lying Down,” last week.
Check it out here: http://tinyurl.com/2abgkzb.
May 2010
“Knowing How to Yield is Strength”
Dear Writing Friends:
It is Monday morning and I am sitting on an old Adirondack chair on my deck. It’s faded from being left outside during too many rainstorms, and it creaks when I move. But it’s a gorgeous day—blue skies and a good breeze. I’m meeting a friend to walk at Town Lake this afternoon while Shira is in rehearsal, although I may need to cancel. Lately my daughter needs me nearby.
Shira is going through what I hope is a phase. She has taken to worrying about her breathing, her tummy, and her teeth. She is afraid of dying. Veteran moms tell me this type of worrying is typical of her age. Around eight and a half or nine years old, the world gets bigger. Science is on her radar now, but so are mortality and war. The age of imagination has been replaced with reality.
Last Thursday, while Steve was out of town and I was impersonating a single mom, Shira woke up feeling down and droopy. She was worried about her tummy and didn’t want to go to school. I sat at the dining room table with her and tried to convince her she should go. The class was having a poetry reading at 10:30, and the teacher was serving hot chocolate.
“You don’t want to miss that, do you?” I said.
“Let me think about it,” she said, and she disappeared into her room.
Admittedly I was tired of dealing with the worry over her tummy. I wanted time alone. And I was counting on the school day to work. I had a calendar marked with due dates and deadlines.
At 7:30, five minutes before we were due to leave the house, Shira came to me still dressed in her nightclothes. She had black circles under her eyes. The school year had been busy with shows, rehearsals, dance lessons, voice lessons, not to mention homework, the Science Fair, and various other school activities and competitions. Maybe she needed to slow down.
“Why don’t you take the day and just relax,” I said. “You can read your poetry for me and Daddy later.” Shira’s shoulders fell from her ears and her face brightened. I felt my load lighten, too. “Thank you, Mommy!” she cried, throwing her arms around me.
The truth was I needed that day off, too. For weeks I had been waking up with tension headaches. Most mornings I shoved Shira out the door and rushed to the kitchen cabinet to find the Advil. My back-to-back deadlines had been my top priority—even when it was clear my daughter was suffering and needed more attention.
Shira and I got dressed and went to Russell’s with our notebooks. She ate a cherry Danish and I drank green tea. While I scribbled some notes for an essay, she drew a picture of herself with a long caption. “Thank you for letting me stay home, Mommy,” she wrote. “I love you, so, so much.”
I had a massage scheduled at noon and we shared it. I held Shira’s hand and kissed her forehead as she lay on the table with her eyes closed. By the end of the day, we had reestablished our bond. At 5:00 I sent her off to her rehearsal and squeezed in some writing. I actually accomplished as much that day as I would have if I had sent her to school.
My writing and my life are so interconnected, I sometimes forget to notice the correspondence between one and the other. When I am fully present in my life, even in difficult times, I write better and more efficiently. Letting go of my habit of hoarding my hours alone, time expands, and I feel more expansive. It is a better place to write from and a better way to live.
Speaking of expansive, I am excited for my summer workshop, “Write from the Bottom of Your Mind.” For six Monday evenings we’ll gather to meditate, slow walk, and do writing practice—making space to clear our minds and connect to ourselves, to our lives, and to our writing. Because I’m limiting my public relations efforts for this class, I’d appreciate your sharing the information with friends and family. Course description and registration form are attached. Also, I’m limiting the class to fifteen students. So if you’re interested, don’t delay. I’m already half full. Lastly, in order to accommodate the neediest students, I am offering a few scholarships and discounts. If you want to take the class and you really, really can’t afford it, contact me and we’ll work something out.
Finally, I’m in the process of revamping my website and the newsletter format. I’ll be making a few changes in the coming months that I hope you’ll like. For starters, I’ll be posting my student’s publications and various local events at the end of every newsletter. If you have something you’d like to share, please let me know.
Writing topic:
What am I hoarding? Where do I need to let go?
This month’s quotation:
Seeing into darkness is clarity.
Knowing how to yield is strength.
Use your own light
and return to the source of light.
This is called practicing eternity.
The Tao Te Ching, translated by Stephen Mitchell
My best to each of you.
Saundra
Students and Friends
Pat Abrams has a piece in The Austin Cycling Association’s bi-monthly newspaper. This is her fourth article for them. The paper also features a great picture of Pat in full bike gear, with her bike and some donkeys.
Mon. May 17th at 7PM, Join Drashers Neena Husid, Laura Kooris, and Esther Mizrachi Moritz for the first ever Bookwoman (5419 Lamar in Austin, Texas) Salon. Come hear their work, create your own, and dive into the Drash Pit process from prompt development to publication.
April 2010
Home Improvements
Dear Writing Friends:
I’m in my writing studio today instead of Starbuck’s, sipping green tea instead of my usual Grande Soy Latte. I have given up the lattes. In fact, I have given up coffee altogether. I recently completed a three-week purification cleanse, for which coffee was not allowed. I was motivated to try the cleanse because I wanted to kick the caffeine habit, as well as clean up my eating habits. And yes, I know green tea has caffeine, but not a lot, and it’s compensated for by the rich antioxidants. And yes, that is somewhat of a justification, but give me credit for the coffee because it was a very big deal.
I’ve been addicted to coffee on and off since I was seventeen. If you know my age and you’re counting, that’s thirty-two years. I’ve quit before—when I was pregnant, of course, and in my late twenties. I was working at the DeCordova Museum when an acupuncturist suggested I try eliminating caffeine. I was so tired the first two weeks I would sneak into the museum bathroom after lunch and sleep on the floor. I kicked the habit but slowly backslid, drifting from green tea to black tea, from black tea to coffee, from two cups to ten. Yes, ten.
Before the cleanse I was crawling back into bed most mornings, waiting for Steve to bring me a maximum strength, large cup from Russell’s on his way home from driving Shira to school. I didn’t keep coffee in the house because, officially, I didn’t drink it—which was getting quite expensive between the morning Russell’s runs and the afternoon lattes at Starbuck’s. It probably goes without saying that by the end of the day, after too many series of adrenalin rushes and subsequent crashes, I was falling-down tired, unable to prepare a decent meal for my family and thus doing a lot of takeout. Which leads us to my eating habits.
Due to poor planning and lack of foresight, I often found myself starving by mid-day with nothing in the house to eat. Most days I ate at coffee shops, hauling my notebook and computer with me. I began eating Caesar salads or tuna salads, but slowly slipped into ordering creamy soups with croutons and bread. Or worse, I just ordered pastry leaving me with a high glycemic hangover and no energy or brainpower to write. All this was exacerbated by my recent trip to Houston when I discovered The Chocolate Bar and found myself sitting in the window seat every day stooped over the richest, thickest, darkest hot chocolate I had ever tasted. I was so quickly addicted to the high butterfat concoction that, when I returned to Austin, I tried to get the mix sent overnight mail.
I’ve written at coffee shops for years, ever since I read Writing Down the Bones and learned that I could write anywhere. But getting out to a coffee shop for a caffeine kick and a hot lunch became a habit. Because I went out a lot, I rarely cleaned my studio. And because I rarely cleaned my studio, I went out a lot to write. I preferred the clean tables by the window at Russell’s to my messy desk at home. But even Russell’s, with it’s soothing, new age music selection, was often noisy with conversation. Many afternoons I’d lose time due to well-meaning interruptions by the regulars.
The cleanse brought me home. Because I was eating mostly smoothies and vegetables, I had to stay close to my kitchen. Mid-morning, instead of running out to get coffee, I cooked vegetables, usually kale or zucchini. And then I returned to my studio. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I used to go to Starbuck’s between my Pilates lesson and picking up Shira from school. During the cleanse, I had to come home and make a smoothie. And, again, I went back to my studio. Spending more time in my studio, I started getting more work done. I wrote two essays in two weeks and my book began falling into place. I felt more at peace as well, staying still for longer. A redbud tree bloomed outside my window and I was constantly serenaded by the call and response of mourning doves.
By the end of the cleanse, in addition to an increase in energy, I had formed new habits. When it was time to add new food, I hesitated, not because I was afraid, but because I was used to eating a certain way. I didn’t want to change. And I became accustomed to being home in my studio. I was happier there than I had ever been. I remember my friend and life coach (and terrific writer), Lori Wostl, saying to a class that it takes three weeks to form a habit. I didn’t think of this when I embarked on the cleanse, but it played out that way.
When I mentioned to my nutritionist, Michelle Brown, that the cleanse had impacted my writing life, she wasn’t surprised. “You make changes in one part of your life,” she said, “and they are bound to impact other areas.” It reminded me of why I fell in love with writing practice. You write down the truth of your life and find yourself changed. You make improvements in your physical and mental health and your writing improves as well.
What new habits would you like to form? Getting up thirty minutes early to write? Exercising on your lunch break? Could you commit to three weeks and see how if affects your life? Try it and give me a holler. Let me know how you are doing.
This month’s quotation:
The daily practice is enough to take you out of the current of your obligations and put you in relation all over again to something that feels like the big current outside of us, the tide of the eventfulness of being alive.
William Stafford
Writing Topics: The daily practice
Habits (good and bad)
Upcoming Workshop:
Write from the Bottom of Your Mind: Summer Writing Practice Period
Monday nights, 6 to 8:30 p.m.
June 7, 14, 21 and July 12,19,27
In this summer series we will get back to the basics: sitting meditation, walking meditation, and writing practice. It will be a time for silence and stillness, providing the opportunity to go deeper into our writing—to write, in the words of Jack Kerouac, “from the bottom of the mind.”
Cost: $199
Location: To be announced
I’m teaching this class independently, without a lot of publicity. If you know someone who may be interested, please forward the information. To reserve a space, you can contact me by e-mail: saundra@texas.net.
My best to each of you.
Saundra
March 2010
Making Use
Dear Writing Friends:
A few weeks ago I finished reading the new Raymond Carver biography by Carol Slenicka, Raymond Carver, A Writer’s Life. It took me three weeks to get through it—it runs close to five hundred pages. But it wasn’t the length that slowed me down. It was my desire to linger in Carver’s life. The first half the book is grim, recounting Carver’s alcoholism and instability. But I persevered because I knww he did, becoming one of the greatest short story writers of our time. I was also interested in Carver’s long tenure in Northern California. For a while he lived in Palo Alto, just twenty miles south of the house where I grew up. His friend and esteemed editor, Gordon Lish, taught at my high school. I got a huge kick out of seeing sleepy Mills High mentioned in a literary biography. Maybe Lish left a little stardust in our halls. Maybe literary greatness was possible on the Peninsula. Another aspect of Carver’s life that resonated: the difficulty of finding time to write while raising a family. Despite the demands on his time and the chaos of his existence – he and his wife were always on the move, always on the verge of financial ruin – he had great determination to write. He chased writing until it was his. And still, even after his children were grown, he had to fight to find time to write.
When I finally finished the biography, I wanted to stay in Carver’s world and began to reread, Fires, his collection of essays, poems and short stories. I underlined and then copied the following quotation into my notebook:
Writers don’t need tricks or gimmicks or even need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this thing or that that thing—a sunset or an old shoe with absolute and simple amazement.
Carver’s words seemed appropriate as I was heading to Taos that week for a silent retreat with Natalie Goldberg. They reminded me that at the very heart of writing was the simple act of waking up.
Carver’s own life was a never-ending source of material. Most of his stories were based on specific events and people he knew, especially his immediate family. He wrote story after story based on life as he lived it, getting down on paper the hard truth of relationships gone sour with poverty and alcohol. While he longed to be like Hemingway, traveling the world in search of adventure and material, he worked best when he stayed close to home. This was an important “take-away” for me. You live your life and you write from it. You try to find the underlying meanings and possibilities in the act of writing. And you hope your work resonates with someone else.
In my former life, before I became a mom, I traveled to see art, and then came home and wrote about it. Art gave me a reason to get out in the world, and it gave me a subject. In the last eight years, I’ve had to stay closer to home, and I’ve ceased to write about art as my primary vocation. Raising a child has provided a different kind of adventure, however. When I’m not struggling with how to divide my time between writing and family, when I am awake in my life, when I remember to stand and gape at what takes place right in front of me, I have no shortage of material.
Last week in Taos, when we were sitting mediation, Natalie said, “The best way to work on what’s over there, is to be present here.” As I’m home and integrating the many lessons of the retreat, this one sticks. Carver struggled with his family obligations. They took him away from writing, which was his heart’s strongest desire. But in the end, it was the family, the life he was living that made him who he was, as he liked to say, “in history.”
This month’s quotation is a poem from Carver’s last collection, A New Path to the Waterfall.
Sunday Night
Make use of the things around you.
The light rain
Outside the window, for one.
This cigarette between my fingers.
These feet on the couch.
The faint sound of rock-and-roll,
The red Ferrari in my head.
The woman bumping
Drunkenly around in the kitchen . . .
Put it all in,
Make use.
Writing Topic: The things around you.
I’m cooking up a series of mediation and writing practice sessions for the summer. Let me know your availability, and I’ll try to plan around summer travel.
My best to each of you.
Saundra
February 2010
I Want What I Want
Dear Writing Friends:
It is Friday afternoon and I have a few hours to write before my daughter comes home, at which point I’m on Mommy duty for the weekend. But my studio is a disaster so I need to get out of the house before I drown in used teabags and discarded newspapers. There are books and papers stacked everywhere, not to mention the little to-do lists that stare at me accusingly every time I sit down at my desk. I point the Subaru toward Starbuck’s but as I pull in, I catch a glimpse of the couple in the car next to me. I know them. They own the coffee shop around the corner from my house.
I sit for a few minutes with my head down and pretend to be busy with my iPhone, hoping they move on without spotting me. But I don’t have a lot of time and I have work to do, so I haul myself out of the car and dart past them. I’m about halfway up the walkway when I hear, “Hi Saundra!” I turn around and feign surprise.
“Oh, hi, I didn’t see you,” I say. “You guys aren’t going here, are you?”
“Nooooo.” They shake their heads in unison. “We’re going to the phone store. What are you doing here?”
Not to be defensive or anything, but I want to point out that I am a regular patron of their coffee shop, Pacha, on Burnet Road. (How else would they know me by name?) I have been buying coffee there since they opened about ten years ago. I know the regulars and I know the baristas, most of whom know that I favor the iced Pacha Latte. It’s made with soymilk, but it takes like ice cream. There is nothing better on a warm Austin afternoon. Plus, it has a good kick. But I have other needs today, which is why I am at Starbuck’s.
“I like the chairs here,” I tell them. And it’s true. I prefer to go local when I can, and I especially want to support small businesses in my neighborhood. But the big floppy chairs are a draw. I like them because I can curl my legs underneath me and rest my notebook comfortably between my lap and the arm of the chair. Also, this particular Starbuck’s has floor to ceiling windows. Light and air are abundant. I feel guilty about working here (it’s so not p.c.), but I want what I want. And when it comes to my writing, I usually let the spoiled child inside me have her way.
In Albert Brooks’ movie, The Muse, a previously successful screenwriter loses his job at a big studio because his boss claims he has lost his creative edge. Despairing that he’ll ever work again, he hires a professional muse, played by Sharon Stone, who works on the condition that she is fed and clothed and that he will do as she says. The Muse hangs around the house all day wearing wear silk pajamas and at night, just when as the nervous writer is about to get down to business, she sends him out for Chinese food. He argues with her, but she insists and, as a result, the work blossoms.
A few months ago, during a regular writing practice session, I struck up a conversation with myself and asked what the artist/writer inside me wanted (I can’t bring myself call her my muse—the whole business is corny enough). I was surprised by what she said. To begin with, she wanted me to clean my studio. How can I work with clutter all around me? she said. You never empty the recycling bin or file anything in that little box you have marked, “to file.”Please put the files back in the file drawer. And while you’re at it, clear off the magazines that are stacked on top of the file cabinet. They’re about to avalanche. Also, books are scattered on the floor and I find them distracting.
Neatnik is not my middle name. I rarely clean up after myself at the end of the day – often, I’m rushing out the door to pick up my daughter from her activities – and when I get into my studio in the morning, I’m nervous about accomplishing everything on my to-do list. And so I find myself running out the door on Friday afternoon, trying to escape the detritus from the past week just to get a little work done.
By the way, something else my artist likes is a purple pen, specifically a Liquid Flair. I’ll write with a blue pen or a black one, but the purple pen delights me. I don’t think I write any better with purple, and hopefully there is no bad purple prose as a result, but that part of me that needs a color fix is happily entertained while I’m writing. I tend to stay in my seat longer when the liquid flair is pouring onto the page.
Lately I’m discovering all sorts of ways to pamper myself while I write. When I’m tired, I write in bed. I know what the sleep experts have to say about this – I’ve done all the research, because I am not a great sleeper – but I don’t care. There is nothing more luxurious than crawling back into bed in the morning with my notebook. It’s even better if my husband stops on the way home from driving our daughter to school and buys me a good cup of coffee (local, of course!). Also, if I have work to do on my computer, it’s much more relaxing to prop a stack of pillows behind my back, put up my feet, and work on the laptop than it is to sit stiff-necked at my desk.
During National Novel Writing Month I bought myself a new coffee mug. I know. Big deal. But most of my coffee mugs are white and this one has pink hydrangeas. It makes my writer feel appreciated. Also, in advance of NaNo month, I spent a week cleaning off my desk and putting my papers away, so that on November 1st I was ready to step in and write 50,000 words in three weeks. It’s true that when I take the time to clear off my desk or pick up the books from the floor, when the studio is well cared for, it calls to me, and I am ever so happy to go in and write. It’s especially peaceful late in the afternoon when the sun sneaks past the sycamore tree outside my window and falls on my floor. And if I’m happy at home, I don’t have the coffee shop dilemma. Which doesn’t mean I don’t take my artist out for coffee when the studio is clean. If she needs some air or a change of scenery, I try to listen to her. I try to give her everything she wants. And it’s rare that she asks for anything extravagant. Like a child, she’s easily entertained. A pen, a mug, or a good cup of coffee will usually do the trick. When I don’t listen to her, or worse, when I ignore her, she pouts. She’s not a workhorse and she doesn’t show up for people who are not nice to her.
The deck at Pacha is pleasant at this time of year. I’m sure we’ll be heading over there any day. As soon as the little voice in my head cries out for some air, I’ll take my writer for a walk through the neighborhood and stop at our favorite neighborhood coffee shop. I’ll order a Pacha Latte while supporting local business, and get a little writing done, too.
This month’s quotation:
Remember that your artist is a youngster and youngsters like things that are ‘mine.’ My chair. My book. My pillow. (Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way)
Writing topic: What I want
Be good to yourself and write.
Saundra
www.saundragoldman.com
January 2010
PLAYING HOOKY
Dear Writing Friends:
It is Wednesday morning, December 30, 2009. I am sitting at a long wooden table in the condo we’re renting in Port Aransas, Texas. It is off-season (Port A. is a beach town) and we’re in an end unit next to an empty field, so it’s blissfully quiet. We made a last minute decision to come here, to spend the remaining days of 2009 by the water. We talked about it forever and, finally, with a long school break ahead of us and no real plans, we took the plunge—made the reservations, boarded the dogs, and packed up the car. It is rare we get out of town, just the three of us. We’re usually too busy and tired from all the work-related trips and family visits to out-of-town relatives.
As I write this, Shira is outside playing with a friend who happens to be here, but even when she was sitting at the table with me earlier this morning, the room was hush. Shira’s been entertaining herself with activity books and drawing. We’ve spent several long mornings at this table together lounging in our pajamas. I’ve been catching up on back issues of the New York Times Book Review and the New Yorker and otherwise giving my mind a well-deserved rest. I left my computer at home along with my book manuscript and the essay I was struggling with last week. I needed a break from my projects and they needed a break from me. I did bring a notebook for my daily writing practice, but other than jotting down a few notes for this newsletter, I’ve been happily unproductive. Although I have been reading in preparation for my spring class. I put the book in my bag at the last minute thinking I might get a head start if there was time, when I was ready, and because it was the only thing I could realistically expect to cross off my to-do list.
Before we left, I made a list of projects I needed to complete in the first week of the New Year. At the top (just ahead of this newsletter) came organizing my spring course for the League. I needed a curriculum, something to hand out on the first day to instill confidence in my students that I have some kind of a roadmap for the course; I needed a lesson plan for the first meeting (January 10); and I needed to read at least part of the first book on our reading list in order to guide discussion. The first two tasks sounded too much like work. On the other hand, I organized the course around books I wanted to re-read and study, and so I tossed my copy of On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan, in my book bag.
With the New Year looming, I feel obliged to give some advice about setting and attaining goals, although that seems to have been well-covered by bloggers and media gurus by now. Knowing that in a few short weeks the resolve we feel today will almost certainly fizzle, I’d like to offer instead a little trick I use when my energy and enthusiasm wane. I adapted this exercise from something I found in Julia Cameron’s book, The Sound of Paper, and will copy it below in lieu of a writing topic and quotation. It involves two simples steps: making a list of five small tasks or actions you could take toward your goal and choosing the one that sounds the easiest and/or the most fun. And when I say small, I mean really small. When I left for Port Aransas, I didn’t set a goal of how many pages I would read each day. I just said I’d begin. This trick works because it requires little commitment and because you get to make a choice. Instead of flogging yourself into getting to the page and writing for two hours, you do something that sounds easy and fun. You’re no longer sitting in detention, but playing hooky! And because it’s easy and fun, you want to do it more. It also leads to the next logical action. In my case, reading lead to more reading, which spurred ideas for the first class. The curriculum followed almost effortlessly. In short, it’s another lesson in trusting your mind.
Our beach vacation was the perfect pause, a chance to slow down and listen. What direction do I want to move in? What comes next? In between watching dolphins dive in the gulf and herons hover in trees, in the quiet mornings at the kitchen table, I heard the sound of my own heart and mind. Instead of torturing myself with resolve to reach goals, I want to have fun. I want “work” to be more like play and I want it to be effortless. It’s not entirely realistic, but it’s something to shoot for. Sounds like a New Year’s resolution to me.
By the way, there is still time to enroll in my spring course, “The Practice of Reading and Writing Together” (details below). We’ll begin reading On Chesil Beach, by McEwan, in which the sexual metaphors of plot are made explicit in the characters’ advances toward lovemaking. Sound fun? It will be. But you’d better hurry. There are only a few spaces left.
Keeping On (from The Sound of Paper, by Julia Cameron)
Try this: Many of us would love to keep on if we could just figure out how. We forget that Morning Pages, Artist Dates, and Walks are all tools that move us forward. Instead of seeking small and gentle next steps, we look for dramatic breakthroughs. Take pen in hand and list five tiny ways by which you could move forward.
For example:
1. Morning Pages
2. Artist Dates
3. Walks
4. Straightening my work area.
5. Subscribing to a magazine in my area of interest.
The point of this list is gentle encouragement, but embedded in that word is the root word of courage. Take heart and execute one tiny step forward.
Upcoming workshop at Writers’ League of Texas:
The Practice of Reading and Writing Together
Sundays, Jan. 10, Feb. 14, March 14, April 11, & May 16, 3 PM to 6 PM
This class combines writing practice with the practice of close and careful reading for craft. Each month the class will cover a different book, selected for its example of structure, scene, setting, etc. Then, students will try those techniques in class using the structure of writing practice. In between meetings, students will write in small groups, either online or in person, depending on the schedules of group members.
This class requires a commitment to regular writing practice, including writing with the small group, reading the assigned material at least once, and reading/listening to one another's work without judgment or comment. Students will have the opportunity to turn in one piece of writing to the instructor for feedback.
This course is limited to 15 people.
Reading List:
Thunder and Lightning, by Natalie Goldberg
Insatiable, by Erica Rivera (author will do phone chat with the class)
The Best Day, The Worst Day, by Donald Hall.
On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan
Larry's Party, by Carol Shields
Inconsolable, by Marrit Ingman (in-class author interview)
For more information, call the League office, (512) 499-8914, or see go to their website: www.writersleague.org/programs/classes.html#goldman2.
My best to each of you for a joyous New Year.
Saundra
October 2009
In Process: Thoughts on Writing and Life
10/31/2009
My Accidental Practice:
It is a rainy Monday night, and I am in the café at BookPeople, an independent bookstore in Austin, while my daughter, Shira, is rehearsing for a show. I have a copy of Hip Mama beside me and a copy of More magazine. I have something specific I’m working on, and I’m trying to find the right home for it. But I’m having trouble restarting my engine after a weeklong silent retreat with Natalie Goldberg in Taos. When I left home last week, I was churning out new work at a breathless pace. But after a week of sitting in silence, I want to stare at the ceiling. Submitting my work doesn’t interest me now.
When I applied for a second intensive with Natalie, I wrote that I wanted to return to Taos to practice, to rest in the structure that Natalie provided. But as soon I was accepted, I forgot my intention. A month before the intensive began, with my fiftieth birthday in clear sight and at least two careers thrown out the window, I became anxious to have something to show for myself. I set the goal to polish two chapters of my book and complete a new proposal by the end of the year. Instead of seeing the four retreats as opportunities to practice, I made each start date a deadline. I completed chapter one by the time of the June retreat and chapter two by August. Two weeks before the August retreat began, I sent seventy-five pages to my agent.
While I was waiting for my agent to reply, passing the time staring at my computer screen waiting to see her name appear in my e-mail inbox, I became restless. I wanted to write, but I didn’t know what to write. I didn’t want to go any further with the book until I received her response. With my hand itching to move across the pages of my notebook, I took myself to a local coffee shop one day and set my timer for twenty minutes. For twenty minutes I wrote without direction, just for the pleasure, just for the practice. It was so delightful, I did it again the following day and the day after that. After a few days I was hooked. That twenty minutes of writing became my accidental practice.
When I had my interview with Natalie in August, I confessed that I had never before done writing practice as, well . . . a practice. We were sitting in a small group in the log cabin of the Mabel Dodge Luhan House, our hands resting in our laps, breathing deeply, continuing to be mindful even as we broke silence for our meeting. When I blurted out my little confession, Natalie looked at me incredulously.
“After all these years?” she said, wincing at me.
“Well, I used to just practice when I began,” I said.
“And then you became ambitious!” she said, pointing her finger in the air. Of course she was right. The ambition I thought I had thrown away when I left academe had stayed in my belly and grown back stronger than ever.
“Ambition girl doesn’t like it when I practice,” I said. “She’s threatened.”
“Ambition girl and practice girl need to make friends,” Natalie said, holding her palms up, side by side, to make her point. “They can support each other, if you let them.” I’d never thought of it that way. I always thought of my ambition and my desire to practice at odds. I left the meeting and set the intention of continuing my twenty-minute writing sessions as a daily practice for the foreseeable future.
Between August and the October retreat I practiced every day, and it was lovely. But then something funny happened. While practice girl was writing one day, ambition girl got the idea that she wanted to revive her freelance career, but with a new direction. She wanted to publish essays. She went home, hired a coach, and made up a schedule. In the weeks before returning to Taos, she wrote two new pieces and a new outline for her book. But every day for twenty minutes, she took a rest, and practice girl got her chance. Practice girl chose a cafe and took her notebook and pens and she wrote whatever she wanted. Ambition girl gave her permission. Look how well things were going with practice girl to rely on for a little rest. However, the writing was going a little too well. Ambition girl got excited about all the work she was getting done, and she had a hard time slowing down. She grew bigger, blowing up like Violet Beauregard after she greedily snatched the gum from Willy Wonka’s factory and transformed into a giant blueberry. Her breathing became shallow and she didn’t sleep so well.
With ambition girl expanding by the moment inside me, I arrived at the October retreat knowing I needed to catch my breath. My mind needed a rest. Fortunately, the retreat structure provided for that, with three rounds of sitting, walking, and writing each day, plus optional sitting before breakfast and reading group in the afternoon. I attended everything and, to insure I didn’t lose it between sessions, I continued my twenty minutes of practice on my own and practiced slow walking on the way to and from the zendo four times a day. Practice girl had her moment and managed to shut down ambition girl all together.
I became so still and silent, however, my deepest sludge began to rise. On day three, all hell broke loose in my mind. Old shame and feelings of worthlessness had a little party, with me as the guest of honor. I cried my way through sitting, walking, writing, and eating. After lunch I thought my tears had run dry. I thought I was done. I returned to the log cabin where we had our interviews to write.
I half expected to find my friend Sharyn in the cabin practicing music, and I decided beforehand that if she were playing, I would practice listening. Sure enough, I walked in and found her tuning her guitar. She looked up at me and nodded. I went to the couch opposite her and lay down. She began to play, and I began to cry again. She played every sad song she knew, and I sobbed until, this time, there really was nothing left. Sharyn never looked up from her playing. She kept her eyes cast down, giving me space to grieve, and she continued her music practice. When she was finished, she packed up her guitar and left.
That night I dreamed that Nat’s assistant, Beth Howard, came to me and told me I was going to die (Beth had come into the cabin and saw me crying and offered me a box of Kleenex). “There’s nothing else the doctors can do for you,” she said in the dream.
“But I feel fine,” I said. “I have no symptoms and my energy is good.”
“It will happen by morning,” she told me. I wrapped a blanket around me and the next thing I knew I was awake in my room at Mabel’s. I looked at my watch. It was 4:30 a.m. I tried to go back to sleep, but a new opening line for my book popped into my head. I knew what I had to do. I got up and found my notebook and went downstairs to the living room and I rewrote the opening scene, which I first wrote five years ago, but this time I wrote it in the second person. I had a new way to enter my story. Whatever died that night made room for it.
Whenever I teach writing practice, there comes a time when my students want more. They get ambitious. They want to take the next step. They want to build something—an essay, a short story, a memoir. And I understand that. Natalie says writers should practice for two solid years before trying to produce anything solid—in order to build spine, in order to feel confident in one’s own voice. While I don’t have the chutzpah to insist my students practice for a full two years, I encourage them to keep building the foundation we begin in class. I want them to keep practicing. I know it will hold them up when their ambition has burned them out. I guarantee it.
My time is up and I have to retrieve my daughter from her class. It has been good to sit at BookPeople and write, to set my timer and go. While I know better than to write with expectation of a finished product, sometimes I sit down to practice and I get a newsletter. Ambition girl likes that a lot.
Quotation:
Let things fall apart inside you, shake loose paper clips, staples, binders, let hope drop down near the raw red smell of liver. (Natalie Goldberg, Thunder and Lightning)
Writing topic: What needs to die?
Don’t forget the upcoming Winter Writing Practice Retreat
sponsored by the Writer’s League of Texas
December 5, 2009, 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
This winter's retreat will help you set the tone for the season with a day of writing practice and meditation. May Sarton wrote that, "winter is the season when both animals and humans strip down to the marrow." While the media tells us to shop, party and overeat, the Earth gives us a different message, that it is time to withdraw, to go under. Topics and exercises at the retreat are designed to help you go deep inside yourself, to strip to the marrow, and get grounded for the weeks and months ahead.
For more information, contact the League and/or go to their website: www.writersleague.org/programs/classes.html#goldman.
My best to each of you.
Saundra
It is a rainy Monday night, and I am in the café at BookPeople, an independent bookstore in Austin, while my daughter, Shira, is rehearsing for a show. I have a copy of Hip Mama beside me and a copy of More magazine. I have something specific I’m working on, and I’m trying to find the right home for it. But I’m having trouble restarting my engine after a weeklong silent retreat with Natalie Goldberg in Taos. When I left home last week, I was churning out new work at a breathless pace. But after a week of sitting in silence, I want to stare at the ceiling. Submitting my work doesn’t interest me now.
When I applied for a second intensive with Natalie, I wrote that I wanted to return to Taos to practice, to rest in the structure that Natalie provided. But as soon I was accepted, I forgot my intention. A month before the intensive began, with my fiftieth birthday in clear sight and at least two careers thrown out the window, I became anxious to have something to show for myself. I set the goal to polish two chapters of my book and complete a new proposal by the end of the year. Instead of seeing the four retreats as opportunities to practice, I made each start date a deadline. I completed chapter one by the time of the June retreat and chapter two by August. Two weeks before the August retreat began, I sent seventy-five pages to my agent.
While I was waiting for my agent to reply, passing the time staring at my computer screen waiting to see her name appear in my e-mail inbox, I became restless. I wanted to write, but I didn’t know what to write. I didn’t want to go any further with the book until I received her response. With my hand itching to move across the pages of my notebook, I took myself to a local coffee shop one day and set my timer for twenty minutes. For twenty minutes I wrote without direction, just for the pleasure, just for the practice. It was so delightful, I did it again the following day and the day after that. After a few days I was hooked. That twenty minutes of writing became my accidental practice.
When I had my interview with Natalie in August, I confessed that I had never before done writing practice as, well . . . a practice. We were sitting in a small group in the log cabin of the Mabel Dodge Luhan House, our hands resting in our laps, breathing deeply, continuing to be mindful even as we broke silence for our meeting. When I blurted out my little confession, Natalie looked at me incredulously.
“After all these years?” she said, wincing at me.
“Well, I used to just practice when I began,” I said.
“And then you became ambitious!” she said, pointing her finger in the air. Of course she was right. The ambition I thought I had thrown away when I left academe had stayed in my belly and grown back stronger than ever.
“Ambition girl doesn’t like it when I practice,” I said. “She’s threatened.”
“Ambition girl and practice girl need to make friends,” Natalie said, holding her palms up, side by side, to make her point. “They can support each other, if you let them.” I’d never thought of it that way. I always thought of my ambition and my desire to practice at odds. I left the meeting and set the intention of continuing my twenty-minute writing sessions as a daily practice for the foreseeable future.
Between August and the October retreat I practiced every day, and it was lovely. But then something funny happened. While practice girl was writing one day, ambition girl got the idea that she wanted to revive her freelance career, but with a new direction. She wanted to publish essays. She went home, hired a coach, and made up a schedule. In the weeks before returning to Taos, she wrote two new pieces and a new outline for her book. But every day for twenty minutes, she took a rest, and practice girl got her chance. Practice girl chose a cafe and took her notebook and pens and she wrote whatever she wanted. Ambition girl gave her permission. Look how well things were going with practice girl to rely on for a little rest. However, the writing was going a little too well. Ambition girl got excited about all the work she was getting done, and she had a hard time slowing down. She grew bigger, blowing up like Violet Beauregard after she greedily snatched the gum from Willy Wonka’s factory and transformed into a giant blueberry. Her breathing became shallow and she didn’t sleep so well.
With ambition girl expanding by the moment inside me, I arrived at the October retreat knowing I needed to catch my breath. My mind needed a rest. Fortunately, the retreat structure provided for that, with three rounds of sitting, walking, and writing each day, plus optional sitting before breakfast and reading group in the afternoon. I attended everything and, to insure I didn’t lose it between sessions, I continued my twenty minutes of practice on my own and practiced slow walking on the way to and from the zendo four times a day. Practice girl had her moment and managed to shut down ambition girl all together.
I became so still and silent, however, my deepest sludge began to rise. On day three, all hell broke loose in my mind. Old shame and feelings of worthlessness had a little party, with me as the guest of honor. I cried my way through sitting, walking, writing, and eating. After lunch I thought my tears had run dry. I thought I was done. I returned to the log cabin where we had our interviews to write.
I half expected to find my friend Sharyn in the cabin practicing music, and I decided beforehand that if she were playing, I would practice listening. Sure enough, I walked in and found her tuning her guitar. She looked up at me and nodded. I went to the couch opposite her and lay down. She began to play, and I began to cry again. She played every sad song she knew, and I sobbed until, this time, there really was nothing left. Sharyn never looked up from her playing. She kept her eyes cast down, giving me space to grieve, and she continued her music practice. When she was finished, she packed up her guitar and left.
That night I dreamed that Nat’s assistant, Beth Howard, came to me and told me I was going to die (Beth had come into the cabin and saw me crying and offered me a box of Kleenex). “There’s nothing else the doctors can do for you,” she said in the dream.
“But I feel fine,” I said. “I have no symptoms and my energy is good.”
“It will happen by morning,” she told me. I wrapped a blanket around me and the next thing I knew I was awake in my room at Mabel’s. I looked at my watch. It was 4:30 a.m. I tried to go back to sleep, but a new opening line for my book popped into my head. I knew what I had to do. I got up and found my notebook and went downstairs to the living room and I rewrote the opening scene, which I first wrote five years ago, but this time I wrote it in the second person. I had a new way to enter my story. Whatever died that night made room for it.
Whenever I teach writing practice, there comes a time when my students want more. They get ambitious. They want to take the next step. They want to build something—an essay, a short story, a memoir. And I understand that. Natalie says writers should practice for two solid years before trying to produce anything solid—in order to build spine, in order to feel confident in one’s own voice. While I don’t have the chutzpah to insist my students practice for a full two years, I encourage them to keep building the foundation we begin in class. I want them to keep practicing. I know it will hold them up when their ambition has burned them out. I guarantee it.
My time is up and I have to retrieve my daughter from her class. It has been good to sit at BookPeople and write, to set my timer and go. While I know better than to write with expectation of a finished product, sometimes I sit down to practice and I get a newsletter. Ambition girl likes that a lot.
Quotation:
Let things fall apart inside you, shake loose paper clips, staples, binders, let hope drop down near the raw red smell of liver. (Natalie Goldberg, Thunder and Lightning)
Writing topic: What needs to die?
Don’t forget the upcoming Winter Writing Practice Retreat
sponsored by the Writer’s League of Texas
December 5, 2009, 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
This winter's retreat will help you set the tone for the season with a day of writing practice and meditation. May Sarton wrote that, "winter is the season when both animals and humans strip down to the marrow." While the media tells us to shop, party and overeat, the Earth gives us a different message, that it is time to withdraw, to go under. Topics and exercises at the retreat are designed to help you go deep inside yourself, to strip to the marrow, and get grounded for the weeks and months ahead.
For more information, contact the League and/or go to their website: www.writersleague.org/programs/classes.html#goldman.
My best to each of you.
Saundra
September 2009
In Process: Thoughts on Writing and Life
09/06/2009
Dear Friends:
A few weeks ago I was at Starbuck’s at 45th and Lamar in Austin, back in the gray chairs I wrote about last spring, when I realized I was bored. The spot had long been my favorite place to write – the floor to ceiling windows and wide spaces between the tables gave me a sense of spaciousness that extended to my writing – but already it had become merely habit to schlep myself there in the early afternoon. I looked around at the half dozen people who roosted there daily, reading their newspapers and their paperback novels and, because I live in Texas, their bibles, and I wondered if they were in the same rut.
I had just submitted another twenty-five pages of my book to my agent (I sent forty pages earlier this summer), which I completed during the ten day period my daughter was home from summer camp, meaning I spent ten days shuttling between my writing studio and the neighborhood pool, sitting at coffee shops editing for hours and then running home to oversee art experiments and baking projects. When I completed the work I promised my agent, I hit the send button with a sense of relief, but instead of giving myself a well-deserved day off or at the very least a nice meal out, I immediately set to work editing a series of documents I promised to a friend for a grant proposal. And when I’d finished with those, I moved on to prepare for a phone interview I had the following morning. I could have stopped there as I had only a few items left on my to-do list and plenty of time to complete them before leaving for a retreat in Taos. I could have used a nap, or even better, a massage, but instead I hauled myself to Starbuck’s on automatic pilot, applying caffeine to my rotting brain. Under different circumstances, I might have gone for a walk to clear my mind, but it was stinking hot outside and even the short sprint from my front door to my car left me wilted.
It was August—and not just any August. The temperatures had climbed past 100 degrees nearly every day since June, and we had next to no rain. My lawn was a toasty golden brown and the leaves on my cedar elm were dry and shriveled. The earth was parched and so was I.
Last August I had the good fortune to spend two weeks in New Mexico, the first week on a silent retreat in Taos and the second hanging out with my family in Santa Fe. During the retreat, while other folks filled up notebooks, I spent every moment of free time sitting on the white Adirondack chair outside my room, staring into the distance. I did not write and I did not worry about it. It occurs to me now that Europeans go on holiday for the entire month of August because they know something that we production-minded Americans resist: the mind and the body need to rest and, if we pay attention, the seasons tell us when.
Here is another reason I go limp in August: it follows June and July, which at least for me are the most energetic and creative months of the year (look at your garden and you can see the connection to the seasons). Summer conferences and travel are added stimuli and I’m usually going full tilt by the time July gets going. Last June I got ramped up after the Agents and Editors Conference in Austin. This year I felt my adrenalin rise while I was in New York on a research and writing mission. Unlike past trips to New York, when I jammed six meetings into a single day, I spread out my appointments leaving long blocks of empty time for writing. On the first day I found an outdoor spot in a café near my girlfriend’s apartment and parked myself there for two hours. I opened my notebook and began writing from where I was—in Manhattan, at a café, sitting outside with a cup of coffee, letting the energy of the city run through me. After a few pages I found myself writing about old boyfriends and realized I had a new essay on my hands. Then, without thinking about it, I began writing about my treatment for functional hypoglycemia and a number of other ailments and thought that might make a nice essay as well. When I got started with my appointments, I had new energy and information for my book and I wrote about that, too. All week I juggled the three projects as I wandered the city, finding new cafes to write in between meetings. By the end of the week I had filled two notebooks. And while I didn’t have the same long stretches of time to myself when I returned to Austin, the energy propelled me for quite a while, until I turned in those last twenty-five pages to my agent. And then it was August.
Nutritionists talk about eating with the seasons. It’s good for the body and it’s good for the earth. I’m proposing that we write with the seasons as well, or at least be mindful of their messages. On the East Coast and in the Midwest, the changing of the seasons is dramatic and evident. But in the Sunbelt you have to look beyond the temperatures. In the fall, you can’t even rely on the color of the leaves as they start to change some time in November and continue through February, which is very confusing. And of course there is next to no snow in the winter, so we’re left to our own to respond to the dark months.
With that awareness of the changing seasons, I’m planning a retreat with on December 5th, to prepare for the solstice. While the media gives us the message that we should party and shop all winter, we’ll check in with ourselves and listen for what the season is really calling for (i.e. long afternoons in front of the fireplace--with a notebook, of course). Information about the retreat is now posted on the Writers’ League of Texas website: http://writersleague.org/programs/classes.html#goldman. I hope to see many of you there.
This month’s quotation is a haiku by Basho, translated in A Zen Wave, Basho’s Haiku and Zen, by Robert Aitken:
Bidding Farewell,
Bidden goodbye,
I walked into
The autumn of Kiso.
Writing Topics:
Planting seeds
I walked into . . .
A few events you might want to take note of if you live in Austin:
1) On September 11, 2009 at 7 pm., contributors to A Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, will read and answer questions at BookWoman. Robert Shapard, editor of the W.W. Norton anthology series Sudden Fiction and Flash Fiction, will be among the participants.
2) Inhabiting Your Life, a women’s writing workshop, led by Leilani Rose and Carolyn Blankenship. A day of writing and sharing, using a variety of insightful and provocative writing prompts to encourage participants to more fully inhabit their lives and to live more mindfully. October 24, 2009, 9 am - 4 pm. For more information, contact Carolyn at cb@io.com or Leilani at lrose11@austin.rr.com.
If you have a writing related event in the area, please let me know and I’ll do my best to post it here.
I think that’s it for now. Keep your hands moving.
My best to each of you.
Saundra
A few weeks ago I was at Starbuck’s at 45th and Lamar in Austin, back in the gray chairs I wrote about last spring, when I realized I was bored. The spot had long been my favorite place to write – the floor to ceiling windows and wide spaces between the tables gave me a sense of spaciousness that extended to my writing – but already it had become merely habit to schlep myself there in the early afternoon. I looked around at the half dozen people who roosted there daily, reading their newspapers and their paperback novels and, because I live in Texas, their bibles, and I wondered if they were in the same rut.
I had just submitted another twenty-five pages of my book to my agent (I sent forty pages earlier this summer), which I completed during the ten day period my daughter was home from summer camp, meaning I spent ten days shuttling between my writing studio and the neighborhood pool, sitting at coffee shops editing for hours and then running home to oversee art experiments and baking projects. When I completed the work I promised my agent, I hit the send button with a sense of relief, but instead of giving myself a well-deserved day off or at the very least a nice meal out, I immediately set to work editing a series of documents I promised to a friend for a grant proposal. And when I’d finished with those, I moved on to prepare for a phone interview I had the following morning. I could have stopped there as I had only a few items left on my to-do list and plenty of time to complete them before leaving for a retreat in Taos. I could have used a nap, or even better, a massage, but instead I hauled myself to Starbuck’s on automatic pilot, applying caffeine to my rotting brain. Under different circumstances, I might have gone for a walk to clear my mind, but it was stinking hot outside and even the short sprint from my front door to my car left me wilted.
It was August—and not just any August. The temperatures had climbed past 100 degrees nearly every day since June, and we had next to no rain. My lawn was a toasty golden brown and the leaves on my cedar elm were dry and shriveled. The earth was parched and so was I.
Last August I had the good fortune to spend two weeks in New Mexico, the first week on a silent retreat in Taos and the second hanging out with my family in Santa Fe. During the retreat, while other folks filled up notebooks, I spent every moment of free time sitting on the white Adirondack chair outside my room, staring into the distance. I did not write and I did not worry about it. It occurs to me now that Europeans go on holiday for the entire month of August because they know something that we production-minded Americans resist: the mind and the body need to rest and, if we pay attention, the seasons tell us when.
Here is another reason I go limp in August: it follows June and July, which at least for me are the most energetic and creative months of the year (look at your garden and you can see the connection to the seasons). Summer conferences and travel are added stimuli and I’m usually going full tilt by the time July gets going. Last June I got ramped up after the Agents and Editors Conference in Austin. This year I felt my adrenalin rise while I was in New York on a research and writing mission. Unlike past trips to New York, when I jammed six meetings into a single day, I spread out my appointments leaving long blocks of empty time for writing. On the first day I found an outdoor spot in a café near my girlfriend’s apartment and parked myself there for two hours. I opened my notebook and began writing from where I was—in Manhattan, at a café, sitting outside with a cup of coffee, letting the energy of the city run through me. After a few pages I found myself writing about old boyfriends and realized I had a new essay on my hands. Then, without thinking about it, I began writing about my treatment for functional hypoglycemia and a number of other ailments and thought that might make a nice essay as well. When I got started with my appointments, I had new energy and information for my book and I wrote about that, too. All week I juggled the three projects as I wandered the city, finding new cafes to write in between meetings. By the end of the week I had filled two notebooks. And while I didn’t have the same long stretches of time to myself when I returned to Austin, the energy propelled me for quite a while, until I turned in those last twenty-five pages to my agent. And then it was August.
Nutritionists talk about eating with the seasons. It’s good for the body and it’s good for the earth. I’m proposing that we write with the seasons as well, or at least be mindful of their messages. On the East Coast and in the Midwest, the changing of the seasons is dramatic and evident. But in the Sunbelt you have to look beyond the temperatures. In the fall, you can’t even rely on the color of the leaves as they start to change some time in November and continue through February, which is very confusing. And of course there is next to no snow in the winter, so we’re left to our own to respond to the dark months.
With that awareness of the changing seasons, I’m planning a retreat with on December 5th, to prepare for the solstice. While the media gives us the message that we should party and shop all winter, we’ll check in with ourselves and listen for what the season is really calling for (i.e. long afternoons in front of the fireplace--with a notebook, of course). Information about the retreat is now posted on the Writers’ League of Texas website: http://writersleague.org/programs/classes.html#goldman. I hope to see many of you there.
This month’s quotation is a haiku by Basho, translated in A Zen Wave, Basho’s Haiku and Zen, by Robert Aitken:
Bidding Farewell,
Bidden goodbye,
I walked into
The autumn of Kiso.
Writing Topics:
Planting seeds
I walked into . . .
A few events you might want to take note of if you live in Austin:
1) On September 11, 2009 at 7 pm., contributors to A Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, will read and answer questions at BookWoman. Robert Shapard, editor of the W.W. Norton anthology series Sudden Fiction and Flash Fiction, will be among the participants.
2) Inhabiting Your Life, a women’s writing workshop, led by Leilani Rose and Carolyn Blankenship. A day of writing and sharing, using a variety of insightful and provocative writing prompts to encourage participants to more fully inhabit their lives and to live more mindfully. October 24, 2009, 9 am - 4 pm. For more information, contact Carolyn at cb@io.com or Leilani at lrose11@austin.rr.com.
If you have a writing related event in the area, please let me know and I’ll do my best to post it here.
I think that’s it for now. Keep your hands moving.
My best to each of you.
Saundra
June 2009
June 2009 Newsletter
06/03/2009
Dear Writing Friends:
About a year ago I attended the annual Agents and Editors Conference, sponsored by the Writer’s League of Texas, as a volunteer. I went to support my writing buddies who were looking for agents and to be part of the annual influx of energy to our city. While I spent most of the day behind the information desk giving pep talks to nervous writers and directing people to the restrooms, I managed to break out for a few sessions. I attended a particularly good course on freelance journalism by Chuck Sambuchino, editor of the annual Writer’s Digest Guide to Literary Agents, but missed what I understood to be an excellent session on Web 2.0 for writers, led by Deltina Hay of Dalton Publishing. Fortunately, my friend Sonya, who happens to be in my writing group, attended Deltina’s session and came back with a mission to get us all started immediately in social networking.
For about six months our writing group met at a local Tex-Mex restaurant, where we discussed the state of our writing lives over salsa and salad. At our first meeting after the conference, Sonya gave us a pep talk about social networking. As we sat stuffing chips into our mouths, she described Deltina’s presentation, and gave us a list of networks we needed join. Let’s just say that two of us were a tiny bit resistant, mostly because we were overwhelmed, and that our enthusiasm for Web 2.0 seemed to vary according to age—and I was not on the side of youth. But we did leave the meeting in agreement that we would all join one of the book sharing sites that Deltina had recommended. That seemed simple enough and something that we could all relate to, seeing as we spent a good part of our days either reading or trying to write books.
We experimented with the three major sites, Shelfari, Library Thing, and Goodreads, and even though I preferred Library Thing, because it shows you who else is reading your books, I landed on Goodreads because my friends preferred it (evidently peer pressure extends to the internet). For a few weeks I faithfully typed in the books on my shelf and rated them, although I did not review them, believing I would come back and do that later. At one point I had the idea that I might use the site as a reference for my writing students, so they could check in and see what I had read and how I had analyzed a given book for structure, which I still think is a good idea, but so far I haven’t found the time to review the 136 books I’ve listed there. For the most part, I don’t spend a lot of time on Goodreads. It’s a good site, but it feels a little too much like work.
In December 2008 my writing group went on hiatus and we now meet only occasionally. Without Sonya’s weekly guidance, I have been left on my own to explore Web 2.0. Not confident that I could manage it on my own, I sought the counsel of marketing expert, who gave me some very good advice about bringing traffic to my website, which I still have not followed through on (I’m very, very slow). I did take his advice to get on Twitter, however, which sounded appealing for its 140-character limit.
One Sunday afternoon, sometime in January, I found myself sitting in my living room casting around for something to do while my daughter and her girlfriend played pretend in the backyard. Maybe this would be a good time to explore Twitter, I thought. I set up my computer where I could see the kids and logged on. I got my name, found a few friends, and proceeded to get totally lost. Evidently I was going to need more counsel before I launched my web presence on Twitter. It didn’t make any sense to me.
I could hear the girls giggling and shouting in the backyard. Knowing I still had some time before their blood sugar dropped and they were back inside demanding snacks, I decided I’d try Facebook, which is infinitely easier to navigate. I quickly found friends there and was immediately hooked. I was a bit nervous, however when one my friends wrote, “Welcome to Facebook, the happiest time suck,” because as working mother, I was already rather short on time. And for the first 48 hours it did indeed suck all my time and mental energy.
As it happened my husband was out of town that week, which meant after I got my daughter to sleep, I was free to stay up late, chatting and searching for new friends. And while I managed to get myself to bed before midnight, when I woke up at 2:00 to go to the bathroom, I peeked at my e-mail to see who had confirmed me as a friend. By 5:00 I was up and plugged in for good, at least until my daughter woke up and needed my assistance getting ready for school. But as soon as I dropped her off, I was back at it. If you’ve been through this, you know the pull. I became so obsessed with building my Friends list, it took me almost a week before I got back to writing anything.
In the early weeks I was mostly finding friends and sending “private” messages. I’d occasionally post a status update but, thinking this was supposed to build my platform, I couldn’t think of much to post beyond progress on my newsletter. After a few weeks trying to seem “professional” got dull and I just started chatting with my friends. Not the 500 people on my Friends list, but my actual friends, my writing buddies, most of whom are scattered across the country. “Finally, a day with some space in it to write,” I posted one day. To which I got several thumbs up. Another day I wrote, “Copying writing from one notebook into another. Laborious, inefficient, but that's the way I do it,” and I heard from several people about their own creative processes. Of course, this is what the Internet has always done best, build community and support for people who feel isolated—like writers and stay-at-home moms.
As time went on I found myself combing my mind each day for what I could post. I usually post at the beginning of the day, before I work, so that the status update works like an intention. I put my task out there in the public and then I feel obliged to go and do it. Sometimes I write at the end of the day about what I’ve accomplished—and again, I get a lot of thumbs-up and “you go, girl.” Lately, friends have been approaching me – in person and on line – and commenting on how productive I am. Of course I don’t post about the hours I waste checking e-mail and my friends’ status updates, but why disillusion them?
A few months ago I made contact on Facebook with an old acquaintance from New York, someone I’d been in a reading group with twenty years ago. It turns out her interests and mine have moved in a similar direction (away from critical writing toward creative writing), which became apparent by the way she was responding to my posts. When I wrote that I had “post-editing mush-brain,” she empathized. “Groan—yes—mush,” she wrote back. And another day when I listed the pile of tasks I had in front me, she shot back with a similar list. Ah, I thought, she’s doing it, so can I. “It’s nice to have a running partner,” I wrote her.
As I write this, I realize how much I miss my writing group. While Facebook isn’t a replacement for sitting face-to-face with friends you trust and who support your work, it is nice to have company. Writing is lonely and we need each other. For me at least, that companionship is mandatory for survival.
Writing Topics: Friends
Home alone
Quotation: As we move our art into public venues, what we need is to find a few friends who encourage us by mirroring our competency. (Julia Cameron, Walking in This World)
I’m actually about to unplug for a week. I’m headed to Taos for another silent meditation and writing retreat with Natalie Goldberg. It will be good to be away from my computer, alone in that strange territory of the mind. I also want to let you know that I’m taking a break from the newsletter for a few months to work on another project.
Have a safe and healthy summer, and I’ll be in touch in September.
My best to each of you.
Saundra
To find out more about the Agents and Editors Conference, go to www.writersleague.org.
To order Deltina Hay’s new book on Web 2.0, go to www.socialmediapower.com.
If you’re interested in bringing more traffic to yours website, write to me and I’ll pass on my friend’s contact info.
About a year ago I attended the annual Agents and Editors Conference, sponsored by the Writer’s League of Texas, as a volunteer. I went to support my writing buddies who were looking for agents and to be part of the annual influx of energy to our city. While I spent most of the day behind the information desk giving pep talks to nervous writers and directing people to the restrooms, I managed to break out for a few sessions. I attended a particularly good course on freelance journalism by Chuck Sambuchino, editor of the annual Writer’s Digest Guide to Literary Agents, but missed what I understood to be an excellent session on Web 2.0 for writers, led by Deltina Hay of Dalton Publishing. Fortunately, my friend Sonya, who happens to be in my writing group, attended Deltina’s session and came back with a mission to get us all started immediately in social networking.
For about six months our writing group met at a local Tex-Mex restaurant, where we discussed the state of our writing lives over salsa and salad. At our first meeting after the conference, Sonya gave us a pep talk about social networking. As we sat stuffing chips into our mouths, she described Deltina’s presentation, and gave us a list of networks we needed join. Let’s just say that two of us were a tiny bit resistant, mostly because we were overwhelmed, and that our enthusiasm for Web 2.0 seemed to vary according to age—and I was not on the side of youth. But we did leave the meeting in agreement that we would all join one of the book sharing sites that Deltina had recommended. That seemed simple enough and something that we could all relate to, seeing as we spent a good part of our days either reading or trying to write books.
We experimented with the three major sites, Shelfari, Library Thing, and Goodreads, and even though I preferred Library Thing, because it shows you who else is reading your books, I landed on Goodreads because my friends preferred it (evidently peer pressure extends to the internet). For a few weeks I faithfully typed in the books on my shelf and rated them, although I did not review them, believing I would come back and do that later. At one point I had the idea that I might use the site as a reference for my writing students, so they could check in and see what I had read and how I had analyzed a given book for structure, which I still think is a good idea, but so far I haven’t found the time to review the 136 books I’ve listed there. For the most part, I don’t spend a lot of time on Goodreads. It’s a good site, but it feels a little too much like work.
In December 2008 my writing group went on hiatus and we now meet only occasionally. Without Sonya’s weekly guidance, I have been left on my own to explore Web 2.0. Not confident that I could manage it on my own, I sought the counsel of marketing expert, who gave me some very good advice about bringing traffic to my website, which I still have not followed through on (I’m very, very slow). I did take his advice to get on Twitter, however, which sounded appealing for its 140-character limit.
One Sunday afternoon, sometime in January, I found myself sitting in my living room casting around for something to do while my daughter and her girlfriend played pretend in the backyard. Maybe this would be a good time to explore Twitter, I thought. I set up my computer where I could see the kids and logged on. I got my name, found a few friends, and proceeded to get totally lost. Evidently I was going to need more counsel before I launched my web presence on Twitter. It didn’t make any sense to me.
I could hear the girls giggling and shouting in the backyard. Knowing I still had some time before their blood sugar dropped and they were back inside demanding snacks, I decided I’d try Facebook, which is infinitely easier to navigate. I quickly found friends there and was immediately hooked. I was a bit nervous, however when one my friends wrote, “Welcome to Facebook, the happiest time suck,” because as working mother, I was already rather short on time. And for the first 48 hours it did indeed suck all my time and mental energy.
As it happened my husband was out of town that week, which meant after I got my daughter to sleep, I was free to stay up late, chatting and searching for new friends. And while I managed to get myself to bed before midnight, when I woke up at 2:00 to go to the bathroom, I peeked at my e-mail to see who had confirmed me as a friend. By 5:00 I was up and plugged in for good, at least until my daughter woke up and needed my assistance getting ready for school. But as soon as I dropped her off, I was back at it. If you’ve been through this, you know the pull. I became so obsessed with building my Friends list, it took me almost a week before I got back to writing anything.
In the early weeks I was mostly finding friends and sending “private” messages. I’d occasionally post a status update but, thinking this was supposed to build my platform, I couldn’t think of much to post beyond progress on my newsletter. After a few weeks trying to seem “professional” got dull and I just started chatting with my friends. Not the 500 people on my Friends list, but my actual friends, my writing buddies, most of whom are scattered across the country. “Finally, a day with some space in it to write,” I posted one day. To which I got several thumbs up. Another day I wrote, “Copying writing from one notebook into another. Laborious, inefficient, but that's the way I do it,” and I heard from several people about their own creative processes. Of course, this is what the Internet has always done best, build community and support for people who feel isolated—like writers and stay-at-home moms.
As time went on I found myself combing my mind each day for what I could post. I usually post at the beginning of the day, before I work, so that the status update works like an intention. I put my task out there in the public and then I feel obliged to go and do it. Sometimes I write at the end of the day about what I’ve accomplished—and again, I get a lot of thumbs-up and “you go, girl.” Lately, friends have been approaching me – in person and on line – and commenting on how productive I am. Of course I don’t post about the hours I waste checking e-mail and my friends’ status updates, but why disillusion them?
A few months ago I made contact on Facebook with an old acquaintance from New York, someone I’d been in a reading group with twenty years ago. It turns out her interests and mine have moved in a similar direction (away from critical writing toward creative writing), which became apparent by the way she was responding to my posts. When I wrote that I had “post-editing mush-brain,” she empathized. “Groan—yes—mush,” she wrote back. And another day when I listed the pile of tasks I had in front me, she shot back with a similar list. Ah, I thought, she’s doing it, so can I. “It’s nice to have a running partner,” I wrote her.
As I write this, I realize how much I miss my writing group. While Facebook isn’t a replacement for sitting face-to-face with friends you trust and who support your work, it is nice to have company. Writing is lonely and we need each other. For me at least, that companionship is mandatory for survival.
Writing Topics: Friends
Home alone
Quotation: As we move our art into public venues, what we need is to find a few friends who encourage us by mirroring our competency. (Julia Cameron, Walking in This World)
I’m actually about to unplug for a week. I’m headed to Taos for another silent meditation and writing retreat with Natalie Goldberg. It will be good to be away from my computer, alone in that strange territory of the mind. I also want to let you know that I’m taking a break from the newsletter for a few months to work on another project.
Have a safe and healthy summer, and I’ll be in touch in September.
My best to each of you.
Saundra
To find out more about the Agents and Editors Conference, go to www.writersleague.org.
To order Deltina Hay’s new book on Web 2.0, go to www.socialmediapower.com.
If you’re interested in bringing more traffic to yours website, write to me and I’ll pass on my friend’s contact info.
This newsletter is sponsored by Drash Pit
(www.drashpit.com)
a literary theme part for readers and writers.
Check it out!
May 2009
May 2009 Newsletter
05/03/2009
Dear Writing Friends:
I’m starting to feel like I’m writing the same newsletter over and over, like I’m always bragging about my ability to squeeze writing into smaller cracks, fitting it in between in-law visits to emergency hospital, childcare, events I promised I would attend with my husband, filling my refrigerator. And this month I do have something along those lines I want to share. During the twelve days my child was home from school for Passover – yes, you read correctly, that was twelve – I rediscovered something I had learned when I first started writing, that if you get out of bed early and write first thing, you can cruise the rest of the day—or take care of the rest of your life, your work, your family, etc.
About halfway into this twelve-day break – once I had calmed down from the triple excitement of having Natalie Goldberg in town, seeing Leonard Cohen (actually, I’m not sure if I’m calmed down from that yet), and two seders – I had the itch to write. After weeks of not being able to settle back down into the book I’m writing, suddenly I felt that if I didn’t add a few new pages, I was going to explode. I got out of bed, threw on some sweat pants, and informed my husband I would be back in two hours. It was 7:15. I went to Starbuck’s on 45th Street, because it is just a few blocks from my house and I didn’t want to waste time, sat myself in my favorite armchair by the window, and wrote. At 9:10 I gathered up my notebooks and pens and returned home where my daughter was waiting for me to entertain her. And that’s the way the rest of the week went. I got a lot done – more than I’m getting done now with Shira back in school – but that’s not what this newsletter is about. I want to tell you what we did in those remaining hours of our days.
Most days when I returned from Starbuck’s Shira was ready to get out of the house, and I obliged. I took her to the park, hiking at Town Lake, ice skating, and shopping. One day we made kosher-for-Passover brownies and another a matzoh spinach pie. By mid-day I was usually tired and ready to get off my feet, at which point I made a cup of tea and we settled down to read. Once we were on the couch, however, we didn’t leave for hours, so hooked were we on Harry Potter. One day we read 100 pages—not all at once, although even spread out over the day, that’s a lot of Harry Potter, all read aloud. Over the twelve-day break, we finished Book Five, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, for a total of 870 pages, and got well underway on Book Six before vacation was over (we’re now reading Book Seven, alas, the last of the series).
I remember the days when Shira’s nap and bedtime routines consisted of reading three board books, how easy it was to whip through Good Night Moon and a few Sandra Boynton books and put her down in her crib. As she got older and her naps got shorter, I felt the pinch of less time to read on my own and thus chose her reading material more carefully. I tried to find books with beautiful language – Charlotte Zolotow was a favorite – so that if nothing else, I was learning something about writing on the level of the sentence. Later, when she was old enough for fairly tales, I bought volumes of them, determined to learn about the deep structure of myth and story in our culture. I can’t say that I was all that successful on that count, but I was trying to squeeze something out of all those hours at someone else’s service. Not to complain. I cherish reading to my child, but such is the reality of trying to balance motherhood and writing.
The long sessions reading Harry Potter actually began a few months before Passover. Shira was going through one of those phases where she wanted every spare moment of her time away from school spent as close to me as she could get, so that instead of her usual Saturday morning play dates with her best pal, Emma, she wanted to be alone with me. For several weeks, we combined baking and reading. While cakes, cupcakes, and cookies were in the oven, we read. And when they were done, we sat down with finished products in our hands and read some more. Eventually we cut out the baking and got right down to reading. One cold Saturday morning we went out for breakfast tacos, returned home, and got under the covers where we read until 1 p.m. I remember looking at the clock and thinking we had forgotten about lunch. Neither my daughter nor I are the kind of people who forget about lunch.
The first Saturday of our newly discovered marathon reading pleasure, I happened to be teaching in the afternoon. I arrived at class as if I had discovered a new drug. I told everyone about my lovely morning of reading aloud to my daughter and then, in place of the elaborate lesson I had prepared for them on the assigned memoir, I read to them. My students sat back in their chairs with their eyes closed. I could see their shoulders drop and pleasure pass over their faces. In my desire to make them good readers (and thus good writers), I had forgotten why they were drawn to the page in the first place.
As Shira became interested in and ready for more sophisticated books, I asked a friend with older children if she thought I should read Shira Harry Potter. “No,” she said. “Wait until she can read it herself, so she can savor it.” That sounded like good advice, and I’m happy I did not follow it. A few months later,Shira walked into the bookstore and grabbed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the first book in the series. She wasn’t ready to read it on her own, and now that we’re on the edge of finding out how it all turned out, I can’t imagine having missed the journey with her.
My husband says that reading is like breathing for me. I can’t live without books. But when I set out to become a writer, reading lost some of its magic. As I became more interested in learning the tricks of the trade, I spent more time trying to figure out how my books were put together, how to achieve certain effects. I still consider this kind of close reading, almost always re-reading, incredibly satisfying, but it does tend to turn your attention away from the story. Imagination is interrupted by intellect. Which brings me back to Harry Potter.
When Shira and I began reading the first book, it occurred to me that I should pay attention to Rowling’s moves. But once we sat down to read, I forgot myself and got lost in the story. When my husband discovered that there were seven books and there was one long, continuous arc, he wondered aloud if she had plotted it all out. “Of course she did,” I snapped at him. It wasn’t that hard for me to imagine the storyboards she must have created and/or the notes she made to keep track of the various plots and subplot. My husband was awed by it. I was not. Trying to keep a narrative straight in my head is something I do every day. Not that I do it that well, it’s just something I live with. Truth be told, I didn’t want to think about it while we were reading Harry Potter. During those long sessions on the couch with Shira, I was so swept away by the story, I often forgot that my daughter was in the room or that I was reading aloud. I didn’t care that there was an author behind the curtain pulling the strings. I only cared about Harry, why he was able to resist Lord Voldemort, how he would get out of whatever current danger he was in, and whether or not Professor Snape was truly on the side of good or, as Harry suspected, still working for the Dark Lord.
So, where am I going with all this? To the past of course, to childhood and to my college years, when a good book was a portal to another world, when I had the time and the space to get lost. I remember sitting on the deck of my parents’ summer time share in Lake Tahoe, scared out of my wits by the ghost under the floor in Therese Raquin, and a long bus ride from Santa Barbara to L.A. when I read My Name is Asher Lev and almost missed my stop. I rarely get lost in a book like that anymore. I don’t have the time. That was the beauty of those twelve days of school vacation. I was at the mercy of long, quiet days with no agenda. You cannot return to childhood, but you can revisit it.
Sometimes in the midst of trying to become great writers, we forget to be ordinary readers. When we lose a sense of what it is to receive a book, and simply mine books for our own purposes, it is easy to forget why we’re writing. Writing is bigger than learning the elements of craft. (Although as you might suspect, when we re-read Harry Potter, as we surely will, I’ll have my writing eyes open and I’ll be taking notes.) As well, I’m reminded that parenting and writing do not have to be at odds (or baking and writing, or banking and writing). When you allow yourself the pleasure of the present moment, when you let go of ambition and striving, the lessons unfold. And sometimes you can squeeze out material for a newsletter.
Writing topic: Tell me about a time you were absorbed in a book.
Quotation:
I hadn’t lived in books with such naïve attention since I was nine or ten years old, and had spent months, years, fleeing from one book to another, like a refugee from something intractable and real: family, my shyness, the feeling of a burnt-out zone in which only I lived. Now it was the same. (Paul Zweig, Departures)
I’m currently in cahoots with Cyndi Hughes, Director of the Writers’ League of Texas, about courses for the next academic year. Let me know your needs and desires and we’ll try to accommodate.
My best to each of you.
Saundra
I’m starting to feel like I’m writing the same newsletter over and over, like I’m always bragging about my ability to squeeze writing into smaller cracks, fitting it in between in-law visits to emergency hospital, childcare, events I promised I would attend with my husband, filling my refrigerator. And this month I do have something along those lines I want to share. During the twelve days my child was home from school for Passover – yes, you read correctly, that was twelve – I rediscovered something I had learned when I first started writing, that if you get out of bed early and write first thing, you can cruise the rest of the day—or take care of the rest of your life, your work, your family, etc.
About halfway into this twelve-day break – once I had calmed down from the triple excitement of having Natalie Goldberg in town, seeing Leonard Cohen (actually, I’m not sure if I’m calmed down from that yet), and two seders – I had the itch to write. After weeks of not being able to settle back down into the book I’m writing, suddenly I felt that if I didn’t add a few new pages, I was going to explode. I got out of bed, threw on some sweat pants, and informed my husband I would be back in two hours. It was 7:15. I went to Starbuck’s on 45th Street, because it is just a few blocks from my house and I didn’t want to waste time, sat myself in my favorite armchair by the window, and wrote. At 9:10 I gathered up my notebooks and pens and returned home where my daughter was waiting for me to entertain her. And that’s the way the rest of the week went. I got a lot done – more than I’m getting done now with Shira back in school – but that’s not what this newsletter is about. I want to tell you what we did in those remaining hours of our days.
Most days when I returned from Starbuck’s Shira was ready to get out of the house, and I obliged. I took her to the park, hiking at Town Lake, ice skating, and shopping. One day we made kosher-for-Passover brownies and another a matzoh spinach pie. By mid-day I was usually tired and ready to get off my feet, at which point I made a cup of tea and we settled down to read. Once we were on the couch, however, we didn’t leave for hours, so hooked were we on Harry Potter. One day we read 100 pages—not all at once, although even spread out over the day, that’s a lot of Harry Potter, all read aloud. Over the twelve-day break, we finished Book Five, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, for a total of 870 pages, and got well underway on Book Six before vacation was over (we’re now reading Book Seven, alas, the last of the series).
I remember the days when Shira’s nap and bedtime routines consisted of reading three board books, how easy it was to whip through Good Night Moon and a few Sandra Boynton books and put her down in her crib. As she got older and her naps got shorter, I felt the pinch of less time to read on my own and thus chose her reading material more carefully. I tried to find books with beautiful language – Charlotte Zolotow was a favorite – so that if nothing else, I was learning something about writing on the level of the sentence. Later, when she was old enough for fairly tales, I bought volumes of them, determined to learn about the deep structure of myth and story in our culture. I can’t say that I was all that successful on that count, but I was trying to squeeze something out of all those hours at someone else’s service. Not to complain. I cherish reading to my child, but such is the reality of trying to balance motherhood and writing.
The long sessions reading Harry Potter actually began a few months before Passover. Shira was going through one of those phases where she wanted every spare moment of her time away from school spent as close to me as she could get, so that instead of her usual Saturday morning play dates with her best pal, Emma, she wanted to be alone with me. For several weeks, we combined baking and reading. While cakes, cupcakes, and cookies were in the oven, we read. And when they were done, we sat down with finished products in our hands and read some more. Eventually we cut out the baking and got right down to reading. One cold Saturday morning we went out for breakfast tacos, returned home, and got under the covers where we read until 1 p.m. I remember looking at the clock and thinking we had forgotten about lunch. Neither my daughter nor I are the kind of people who forget about lunch.
The first Saturday of our newly discovered marathon reading pleasure, I happened to be teaching in the afternoon. I arrived at class as if I had discovered a new drug. I told everyone about my lovely morning of reading aloud to my daughter and then, in place of the elaborate lesson I had prepared for them on the assigned memoir, I read to them. My students sat back in their chairs with their eyes closed. I could see their shoulders drop and pleasure pass over their faces. In my desire to make them good readers (and thus good writers), I had forgotten why they were drawn to the page in the first place.
As Shira became interested in and ready for more sophisticated books, I asked a friend with older children if she thought I should read Shira Harry Potter. “No,” she said. “Wait until she can read it herself, so she can savor it.” That sounded like good advice, and I’m happy I did not follow it. A few months later,Shira walked into the bookstore and grabbed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the first book in the series. She wasn’t ready to read it on her own, and now that we’re on the edge of finding out how it all turned out, I can’t imagine having missed the journey with her.
My husband says that reading is like breathing for me. I can’t live without books. But when I set out to become a writer, reading lost some of its magic. As I became more interested in learning the tricks of the trade, I spent more time trying to figure out how my books were put together, how to achieve certain effects. I still consider this kind of close reading, almost always re-reading, incredibly satisfying, but it does tend to turn your attention away from the story. Imagination is interrupted by intellect. Which brings me back to Harry Potter.
When Shira and I began reading the first book, it occurred to me that I should pay attention to Rowling’s moves. But once we sat down to read, I forgot myself and got lost in the story. When my husband discovered that there were seven books and there was one long, continuous arc, he wondered aloud if she had plotted it all out. “Of course she did,” I snapped at him. It wasn’t that hard for me to imagine the storyboards she must have created and/or the notes she made to keep track of the various plots and subplot. My husband was awed by it. I was not. Trying to keep a narrative straight in my head is something I do every day. Not that I do it that well, it’s just something I live with. Truth be told, I didn’t want to think about it while we were reading Harry Potter. During those long sessions on the couch with Shira, I was so swept away by the story, I often forgot that my daughter was in the room or that I was reading aloud. I didn’t care that there was an author behind the curtain pulling the strings. I only cared about Harry, why he was able to resist Lord Voldemort, how he would get out of whatever current danger he was in, and whether or not Professor Snape was truly on the side of good or, as Harry suspected, still working for the Dark Lord.
So, where am I going with all this? To the past of course, to childhood and to my college years, when a good book was a portal to another world, when I had the time and the space to get lost. I remember sitting on the deck of my parents’ summer time share in Lake Tahoe, scared out of my wits by the ghost under the floor in Therese Raquin, and a long bus ride from Santa Barbara to L.A. when I read My Name is Asher Lev and almost missed my stop. I rarely get lost in a book like that anymore. I don’t have the time. That was the beauty of those twelve days of school vacation. I was at the mercy of long, quiet days with no agenda. You cannot return to childhood, but you can revisit it.
Sometimes in the midst of trying to become great writers, we forget to be ordinary readers. When we lose a sense of what it is to receive a book, and simply mine books for our own purposes, it is easy to forget why we’re writing. Writing is bigger than learning the elements of craft. (Although as you might suspect, when we re-read Harry Potter, as we surely will, I’ll have my writing eyes open and I’ll be taking notes.) As well, I’m reminded that parenting and writing do not have to be at odds (or baking and writing, or banking and writing). When you allow yourself the pleasure of the present moment, when you let go of ambition and striving, the lessons unfold. And sometimes you can squeeze out material for a newsletter.
Writing topic: Tell me about a time you were absorbed in a book.
Quotation:
I hadn’t lived in books with such naïve attention since I was nine or ten years old, and had spent months, years, fleeing from one book to another, like a refugee from something intractable and real: family, my shyness, the feeling of a burnt-out zone in which only I lived. Now it was the same. (Paul Zweig, Departures)
I’m currently in cahoots with Cyndi Hughes, Director of the Writers’ League of Texas, about courses for the next academic year. Let me know your needs and desires and we’ll try to accommodate.
My best to each of you.
Saundra
This newsletter is sponsored by BookWoman, Texas' only feminist bookstore,
serving the women's community for 30 years.
5501 N. Lamar Blvd. #A-105 Austin Texas,
http://www.ebookwoman.com, 512 472-2785.
March 2009
March 2009 Newsletter
03/08/2009
Dear Writing Friends,
As many of you know, I recently returned from a silent meditation and writing retreat with Natalie Goldberg. I intended to get this newsletter out immediately when I came home, as I hate to be late for anything. I thought there would be some event worthy of a short essay to share with you, some small bit of wisdom gleaned from my week in Taos. But the silence sunk deep into my belly this time and I found myself unable to squeeze meaning out of my experience. I wrote things down—the patchwork of snow and trees on Taos Mountain, a magpie sitting on a coyote fence—but they didn’t add up to anything. For a change, I was seeing thing as they were without pressing meaning upon them.
Although it has been over a week since we broke silence, I have been reluctant to let go of it, avoiding phone calls and small talk. As of Wednesday, I hadn’t even called my parents or the friends who covered childcare while I was away. I hope they will forgive me. They know my gratitude, and I’ll speak it soon enough. Natalie often talks about being slow and dumb, that these are the qualities a writer should cultivate. With an M.A. and a Ph.D. following my name, I often forget that and revert to thinking I should be quick and sharp, that my mind should be like a firecracker shooting off sparks all the time (which, admittedly, I find pleasant). But today I am glad for a peaceful mind. Silence and stillness are holding me up.
Wednesday my husband took his father to the hospital with chest pains While Steve sat in the emergency room with his father, I sat with my mother-in-law in her house. In the morning, when I arrived, she hadn’t dressed yet, so I waited for her in the living room. It took a long time for her to finish. I had my book bag, filled with notebooks and magazines and books, but I did not open it. I sat in the quiet house. Every once in a while it would cross my mind that I should worry that it was taking so long, but I resisted the temptation to check on her. She is eighty-six years old and she moves slowly. I let her take her time, and it helped me to stay present and focused. I had been practicing for this all week.
We spent most of the morning at the kitchen table staring at my cell phone, waiting for the latest word from my husband. He called to say they were checked into the hospital and waiting for a room. Then he called to tell me they were taking blood but wouldn’t have the results for an hour and a half. Then they were waiting for an EKG, then waiting for a doctor, waiting for an angiogram, waiting for information, waiting to see what the coming days would hold for us. In between phone calls, Mom and I ate soup and grapes and looked at baby pictures of my husband, all the time sitting across from each other at the kitchen table. At one point she said I didn’t have to babysit her. I told her I didn’t think of it that way. “We’re both waiting,” I said. “We might as well wait together.”
“It’s hard not to let your imagination wander,” she said. I told her that was normal and then tried to bring her back to the present moment: She and I sitting at the table together, dad in the hospital, getting the care he needed, none of us knowing what would be. A therapist once described it to me as anxiety on the edge of the unknown, a difficult place to rest. But we practiced together all day.
Steve’s dad had triple by-pass surgery on Friday. He sailed through it and is on his way to recovery. My book and my work (and this newsletter) have been on hold all week. I worry about when I’ll get back into the swing of my life, when I’ll be productive again. A good friend wrote the following in an e-mail: “Your practice is staying in the present moment with your family now.” I think that’s good advice. That’s what I’m trying to do, be here now with them and for them. Later I’ll write about it!
Quotation:
Knowing where you are can be a source of creative stability. If you are in Chicago you can go to Rome. If you ain’t no place you can’t go nowhere.
Richard Hugo, “Writing off the Subject”
Writing Topics:
Waiting
Where I am
Most of you are aware that Natalie Goldberg will be in Austin in just a few weeks, promoting the paperback edition of Old Friend From Faraway. On Wednesday, April 1, at 7 p.m., she will speak and sign books at Congregation Beth Israel (3901 Shoal Creek). Please help me welcome Natalie to Austin and find out why she is such a beloved teacher.
My best to everyone.
Saundra
As many of you know, I recently returned from a silent meditation and writing retreat with Natalie Goldberg. I intended to get this newsletter out immediately when I came home, as I hate to be late for anything. I thought there would be some event worthy of a short essay to share with you, some small bit of wisdom gleaned from my week in Taos. But the silence sunk deep into my belly this time and I found myself unable to squeeze meaning out of my experience. I wrote things down—the patchwork of snow and trees on Taos Mountain, a magpie sitting on a coyote fence—but they didn’t add up to anything. For a change, I was seeing thing as they were without pressing meaning upon them.
Although it has been over a week since we broke silence, I have been reluctant to let go of it, avoiding phone calls and small talk. As of Wednesday, I hadn’t even called my parents or the friends who covered childcare while I was away. I hope they will forgive me. They know my gratitude, and I’ll speak it soon enough. Natalie often talks about being slow and dumb, that these are the qualities a writer should cultivate. With an M.A. and a Ph.D. following my name, I often forget that and revert to thinking I should be quick and sharp, that my mind should be like a firecracker shooting off sparks all the time (which, admittedly, I find pleasant). But today I am glad for a peaceful mind. Silence and stillness are holding me up.
Wednesday my husband took his father to the hospital with chest pains While Steve sat in the emergency room with his father, I sat with my mother-in-law in her house. In the morning, when I arrived, she hadn’t dressed yet, so I waited for her in the living room. It took a long time for her to finish. I had my book bag, filled with notebooks and magazines and books, but I did not open it. I sat in the quiet house. Every once in a while it would cross my mind that I should worry that it was taking so long, but I resisted the temptation to check on her. She is eighty-six years old and she moves slowly. I let her take her time, and it helped me to stay present and focused. I had been practicing for this all week.
We spent most of the morning at the kitchen table staring at my cell phone, waiting for the latest word from my husband. He called to say they were checked into the hospital and waiting for a room. Then he called to tell me they were taking blood but wouldn’t have the results for an hour and a half. Then they were waiting for an EKG, then waiting for a doctor, waiting for an angiogram, waiting for information, waiting to see what the coming days would hold for us. In between phone calls, Mom and I ate soup and grapes and looked at baby pictures of my husband, all the time sitting across from each other at the kitchen table. At one point she said I didn’t have to babysit her. I told her I didn’t think of it that way. “We’re both waiting,” I said. “We might as well wait together.”
“It’s hard not to let your imagination wander,” she said. I told her that was normal and then tried to bring her back to the present moment: She and I sitting at the table together, dad in the hospital, getting the care he needed, none of us knowing what would be. A therapist once described it to me as anxiety on the edge of the unknown, a difficult place to rest. But we practiced together all day.
Steve’s dad had triple by-pass surgery on Friday. He sailed through it and is on his way to recovery. My book and my work (and this newsletter) have been on hold all week. I worry about when I’ll get back into the swing of my life, when I’ll be productive again. A good friend wrote the following in an e-mail: “Your practice is staying in the present moment with your family now.” I think that’s good advice. That’s what I’m trying to do, be here now with them and for them. Later I’ll write about it!
Quotation:
Knowing where you are can be a source of creative stability. If you are in Chicago you can go to Rome. If you ain’t no place you can’t go nowhere.
Richard Hugo, “Writing off the Subject”
Writing Topics:
Waiting
Where I am
Most of you are aware that Natalie Goldberg will be in Austin in just a few weeks, promoting the paperback edition of Old Friend From Faraway. On Wednesday, April 1, at 7 p.m., she will speak and sign books at Congregation Beth Israel (3901 Shoal Creek). Please help me welcome Natalie to Austin and find out why she is such a beloved teacher.
My best to everyone.
Saundra
February 2009
February 2009 Newsletter
02/02/2009
Dear Writing Friends,
Welcome to February. Below is another offering of my wandering mind:
What’s in front of me. I learned this topic at my first Natalie Goldberg workshop in 1999, and I’ve used it ever since. I have assigned it to my own students, I have listed it as a writing prompt in more than one newsletter, and I have just come upon it again in Natalie’s recent book, Old Friend From Far Away, the Practice of Writing Memoir—which is sitting in front of me in a stack with other writing books. I am at Russell’s coffee shop this morning, sitting by the window looking out at Hancock Avenue. I have in front of me a cup of decaf coffee with cream, a bran muffin, and my timer. I am here to write, to plough through the writing topics in Old Friend From Far Away that I’ve assigned to my memoir class, and to put in a little time on my manuscript. I have the writing books for support.
I have three shelves of writing books at home. I have been collecting them since 1997. I was in the middle of my doctoral dissertation and somewhat stuck, when a friend suggested I read Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott. “You need to learn about shitty first drafts,” she told me. “Shitty First Drafts” is the title of an essay in Lamott’s book. I read Bird by Bird and it was helpful, but then I was having lunch with a fellow graduate student and she mentioned a book that she liked even better. “Get Writing Down the Bones,” she said. “That will change things for you.” After reading a few chapters of Bones, I sat down at the kitchen table and set the oven timer for ten minutes. I wrote for the rest of the morning and I have been writing ever since. Writing Down the Bones did more than any other book to get me writing—but that did not stop me from acquiring three shelves of books.
I know in my heart that the best way to learn about writing is through reading. To learn about essays, read essays. To learn about memoir, read memoirs. And then re-read them and pick them apart. I believe that. But I also have those three shelves of books that I read for inspiration or to study fine points of craft or to learn about a particular genre. I have books about writing poetry (and books about reading poetry), books about short stories, memoir, and creative nonfiction. Some of these books have great exercises. Some of them have words of wisdom. I’m a little sheepish about having so many, but I do love them.
So, what books are in front of me?
1) Old Friend From Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir. Natalie conceived this book to be like her workshops, “to drench you in the writing process and in your life of memory.” The book is packed with writing topics and I have assigned my students the first two sections by our next class. I am trying to work along with them. In fact, I was motivated to teach the class so I would work through the book myself. I did not have the discipline to do it on my own. It is amazing what accountability will do for your productivity. I told students not to worry if they didn't get to every topic, but they should tackle those topics they had the most resistance to. One student began a write by complaining about the topic, "I remember," which is the backbone of the book. After venting for several lines, she landed in the most remarkable material from her childhood. I recommend the book, but you may need a partner to get through it.
2) The Writer’s Journey, by Christopher Vogler. When I first heard about this book, I resisted it as it sounded like a formula for success in Hollywood (Vogler was an advisor at Disney). I was at the beginning of my writing journey and wanted to give myself freedom to write in whatever direction I wanted. Also, I had just finished a Ph.D. program, and I wanted to write without rules for a while. That was ten years ago, however, and lately I've become interested in mythic structure and archetype. Since Vogler translates Campbell's ideas about myth and archetype for modern storytelling, it seemed like a good place to start.
As I read The Writer’s Journey, I'm amazed by how much mythic structure I've absorbed by osmosis. There are so many points of correspondence between Vogler's ideas and the structure of the book I'm writing, it's spooky. But now that I am aware of those correspondences, I hope I can make my narrative stronger by tightening those places where myth and archetype have already surfaced, and letting them play out.
3) The Portable MFA. I noticed this book on my friend Nita Sweeney’s syllabus. If Nita had assigned it to her students, I thought, it might hold the magical key to my writing dreams. I ordered it right away. So far, I’ve only read the section on writing essays, and while it’s very good, there’s not much I don’t already know here. That’s fine. It reminds me that the way to learn about writing is by writing, and that I should get back to it. But since I have your attention and you’re probably just a wee bit curious about what’s in the book, I’ll share with you a few good tips from Peter Bricklebank, the author of the chapter on essays:
1) You can be sensitive, rational, and reasonable in the essay. But you don’t have to be. In fact, just like in the real world, it often helps if you aren’t. Aside from the times when you affect a particular disposition to attain a goal, don’t feel obliged to be nice and well-behaved in the essay. No one is going to tell your mother.
I love this about writing, the part about not being well-behaved.
2) You find a form through your early drafts. Commit your ideas to paper, no matter how fragmentary, even if you can’t see all the connections or the overall direction. This creates a rough guide for you to follow and/or diverge from as you rework. As you do this, connections will suggest themselves to you, and draft by draft, a form will gradually emerge.
Okay, not as much fun as misbehaving, but I need to remind myself of how this whole process works as I struggle to complete a fully-revised, first chapter of my book. Wish me luck!
I’ve posted book reviews for Old Friend From Far Away and The Writer’s Journey on goodreads.com. I have thirty-five writing books on my bookshelf there. I only put up books I recommend, so even if there isn’t a review, you can get an idea of the books that have helped and inspired me. If you have books you would like to recommend, sign up to be my friend on GoodReads and share.
Writing topics:
What in front of me (you had to see that coming)
What’s on my bookshelf?
Quotation:
It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power, which bubbles so pleasantly beginning a new book, quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of impending shape keep on at it more than anything.
Virginia Woolf
Have a wonderful month. Read, write, and take care of yourselves.
Best,
Saundra
Welcome to February. Below is another offering of my wandering mind:
What’s in front of me. I learned this topic at my first Natalie Goldberg workshop in 1999, and I’ve used it ever since. I have assigned it to my own students, I have listed it as a writing prompt in more than one newsletter, and I have just come upon it again in Natalie’s recent book, Old Friend From Far Away, the Practice of Writing Memoir—which is sitting in front of me in a stack with other writing books. I am at Russell’s coffee shop this morning, sitting by the window looking out at Hancock Avenue. I have in front of me a cup of decaf coffee with cream, a bran muffin, and my timer. I am here to write, to plough through the writing topics in Old Friend From Far Away that I’ve assigned to my memoir class, and to put in a little time on my manuscript. I have the writing books for support.
I have three shelves of writing books at home. I have been collecting them since 1997. I was in the middle of my doctoral dissertation and somewhat stuck, when a friend suggested I read Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott. “You need to learn about shitty first drafts,” she told me. “Shitty First Drafts” is the title of an essay in Lamott’s book. I read Bird by Bird and it was helpful, but then I was having lunch with a fellow graduate student and she mentioned a book that she liked even better. “Get Writing Down the Bones,” she said. “That will change things for you.” After reading a few chapters of Bones, I sat down at the kitchen table and set the oven timer for ten minutes. I wrote for the rest of the morning and I have been writing ever since. Writing Down the Bones did more than any other book to get me writing—but that did not stop me from acquiring three shelves of books.
I know in my heart that the best way to learn about writing is through reading. To learn about essays, read essays. To learn about memoir, read memoirs. And then re-read them and pick them apart. I believe that. But I also have those three shelves of books that I read for inspiration or to study fine points of craft or to learn about a particular genre. I have books about writing poetry (and books about reading poetry), books about short stories, memoir, and creative nonfiction. Some of these books have great exercises. Some of them have words of wisdom. I’m a little sheepish about having so many, but I do love them.
So, what books are in front of me?
1) Old Friend From Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir. Natalie conceived this book to be like her workshops, “to drench you in the writing process and in your life of memory.” The book is packed with writing topics and I have assigned my students the first two sections by our next class. I am trying to work along with them. In fact, I was motivated to teach the class so I would work through the book myself. I did not have the discipline to do it on my own. It is amazing what accountability will do for your productivity. I told students not to worry if they didn't get to every topic, but they should tackle those topics they had the most resistance to. One student began a write by complaining about the topic, "I remember," which is the backbone of the book. After venting for several lines, she landed in the most remarkable material from her childhood. I recommend the book, but you may need a partner to get through it.
2) The Writer’s Journey, by Christopher Vogler. When I first heard about this book, I resisted it as it sounded like a formula for success in Hollywood (Vogler was an advisor at Disney). I was at the beginning of my writing journey and wanted to give myself freedom to write in whatever direction I wanted. Also, I had just finished a Ph.D. program, and I wanted to write without rules for a while. That was ten years ago, however, and lately I've become interested in mythic structure and archetype. Since Vogler translates Campbell's ideas about myth and archetype for modern storytelling, it seemed like a good place to start.
As I read The Writer’s Journey, I'm amazed by how much mythic structure I've absorbed by osmosis. There are so many points of correspondence between Vogler's ideas and the structure of the book I'm writing, it's spooky. But now that I am aware of those correspondences, I hope I can make my narrative stronger by tightening those places where myth and archetype have already surfaced, and letting them play out.
3) The Portable MFA. I noticed this book on my friend Nita Sweeney’s syllabus. If Nita had assigned it to her students, I thought, it might hold the magical key to my writing dreams. I ordered it right away. So far, I’ve only read the section on writing essays, and while it’s very good, there’s not much I don’t already know here. That’s fine. It reminds me that the way to learn about writing is by writing, and that I should get back to it. But since I have your attention and you’re probably just a wee bit curious about what’s in the book, I’ll share with you a few good tips from Peter Bricklebank, the author of the chapter on essays:
1) You can be sensitive, rational, and reasonable in the essay. But you don’t have to be. In fact, just like in the real world, it often helps if you aren’t. Aside from the times when you affect a particular disposition to attain a goal, don’t feel obliged to be nice and well-behaved in the essay. No one is going to tell your mother.
I love this about writing, the part about not being well-behaved.
2) You find a form through your early drafts. Commit your ideas to paper, no matter how fragmentary, even if you can’t see all the connections or the overall direction. This creates a rough guide for you to follow and/or diverge from as you rework. As you do this, connections will suggest themselves to you, and draft by draft, a form will gradually emerge.
Okay, not as much fun as misbehaving, but I need to remind myself of how this whole process works as I struggle to complete a fully-revised, first chapter of my book. Wish me luck!
I’ve posted book reviews for Old Friend From Far Away and The Writer’s Journey on goodreads.com. I have thirty-five writing books on my bookshelf there. I only put up books I recommend, so even if there isn’t a review, you can get an idea of the books that have helped and inspired me. If you have books you would like to recommend, sign up to be my friend on GoodReads and share.
Writing topics:
What in front of me (you had to see that coming)
What’s on my bookshelf?
Quotation:
It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power, which bubbles so pleasantly beginning a new book, quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of impending shape keep on at it more than anything.
Virginia Woolf
Have a wonderful month. Read, write, and take care of yourselves.
Best,
Saundra
This month’s newsletter is sponsored by Life Coach Ann Daly, PhD,
helping women get clear about what they want and
how to get it. Subscribe to Ann's free eletter at:
http://www.anndaly.com/eletter
January 2009
January 2009 Newsletter
01/01/2009
Dear Writing Friends:
It is mid-December and we’re in the middle of a cold snap, unusual weather for Austin, the temps dipping below freezing for the second day in a row. I am sitting at the Triumph Café on Anderson Avenue, having just finished eating an enormous plate of curried vegetables. I have discovered that if I come here after the lunch hour, around 2:00, it is quiet, and I can eat and write in peace. The surroundings are less than elegant, but there is good light here and no loud music, no music at all in fact, which I appreciate in this age where every retail and dining experience requires a soundtrack.
I am thinking about how 2008 started for me, in a state of total burnout. I remember being in New York in January, sitting at an Au Bon Pain, a few blocks north of Houston Street on the East Side. I was in between appointments with a large chunk of time to kill. My energy was fading and I decided to stop for lunch before heading to the New Museum in the Bowery. I ducked into the familiar chain restaurant and bought some lentil soup and a chunk of bread. I sat down at a Formica table, propped my feet up on the chair next to me, and ate. When I was finished, I returned to the counter and bought an enormous cup of coffee, enough I thought to jolt me back to life and get me through a museum visit and my 5:00 appointment. I emptied the cup, but I felt more tired than before. I thought about returning to my friend’s apartment and taking a nap—I’d have enough time if I got in a cab—but an old familiar voice told me to press on. I should make good use of my time. I’m in New York. I should see some art. I shouldn’t waste my time sleeping. And so I pressed on, going back to the streets on legs that felt like they might break and with a foggy head.
I had been reluctant to go on this trip. The fatigue had set in earlier in the month when I was visiting my family in California. In the mornings, after drinking my requisite two cups of Earl Gray tea, I found myself stopping at Starbuck’s for an extra lift. It crossed my mind that I could stay home for a change, stop running off to more interesting parts of the country. I knew it would be cold in New York and, even though I had bought a beautiful new coat in San Francisco, I dreaded that achy, icy feeling you get at night when you’re tired and cold. And then my beloved cousin, Robert Friedenthal, died just a few days prior to my leaving. I wanted to pull inward and grieve for him, pour over my memories in peace. But I had important interviews planned. One of them had been particularly hard to pin down. I knew I had to go and I knew the toll it would take on me.
When I returned from my trip I was sick, a stomach bug that I had a difficult time recovering from. I lay in bed for a week and although my appetite eventually returned, my energy did not. I knew what it was. I had it once before: adrenal fatigue, which I recognized from the unmistakable feeling that I might be dying. I know that sounds dramatic, but ask anyone who has suffered from it and they will tell you the same thing.
I saw my nurse practitioner and I saw my acupuncturist. They both prescribed rest, which wasn’t difficult considering I could barely haul my butt out of bed. But it was also frustrating. I wanted to work on my book, to make measurable progress, and I had no stamina. Anxious to get on with it, I sought the services of my friend Carolyn Scarborough, who had recently become a life coach. During our first conversation Carolyn surmised that I was working on the rewards system, meaning that I would write a certain amount each day and then reward myself with something pleasurable, like a walk or trip to the florist. Except I was leaving out the rewards. To rectify the situation, Carolyn gave me an outrageous suggestion.
“Why not reward yourself first,” she said, “and see how that radiates.”
Radiates? What the heck did that mean?
“Why don’t you see what happens when you take care of yourself first and see how that affects your attitude toward writing and taking care of your family?”
Taking care of my family? That wasn’t what I was getting help for. I didn’t feel like doing that. I wanted to work on my book, make forward progress, move on, get things done, watch manuscript pages pile up on my desk, not serve three square meals a day, make the beds, whistle while I work, etc.
“Why don’t you just try it?” she said. “It will be your homework for the week. We can talk about it more next Monday.”
And so I did what she suggested. In the mornings, when my husband and daughter left the house, I crawled back into bed with a book. Some days I took magazines into bed and cut out pictures of homes and gardens and other things that looked appealing to me and pasted them in a scrapbook. I took long baths with sage oil I bought in Taos, and sat meditation every morning. I stared out the window and thought about my sweet cousin. And I took a lot of naps. I tried to eat good food (my acupuncturist was pushing greens) and I cut back on caffeine.
And the results? It was a very good year. In 2008 I began teaching again. I started with a few three-hour workshops and they have blossomed into longer courses and a full-day retreat that will take place this spring. I also reinstated my newsletter and showed myself that I was still capable of meeting monthly deadlines. And the most satisfying piece of all: I found a structure for my book. After almost ten years of searching, it fell into my lap.
My attitude toward my family has improved. On days when I’ve had time to myself, I appreciate their company. I still don’t feel like cleaning up the crap they leave around the house, but that’s a different issue that doesn’t have anything to do with writing—I don’t think. If I find some way to tie it all together, I’ll let you know.
Once a week, my husband’s parents have dinner at our house. For years, my mother-in-law has been telling me to slow down. “You look tired,” she says. “You need to put your feet up.” Sure, I’d think, like I have time for that. Lately, at the end of an evening when she is about to leave the house, she takes me by the shoulders and looks into my face. “Take care of yourself,” she says. “And God will take care of you.” It’s a Yiddish proverb, which my father-in-law repeats for me in the old language: “Dee heet zech oop un Gott vell deer heeten.” I’m finally beginning to understand.
This month’s quotation:
An artist must have downtime, time to do nothing. Defending our right to such time takes courage, conviction, and resiliency. Such time, space, and quiet will strike our family and friends as withdrawal from them. It is.
Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
Writing Topic: Rest
To find out about Carolyn Scarborough’s coaching practice for writers, see her website: www.backyardpearls.com. Her recent blog posts have tips and reflections for writers. Carolyn’s book, Backyard Pearls, a wonderful collection of stories and “pearls of wisdom” from everyday life, is available on Amazon.
Course reminder: “Writing Practice, Memory, and Memoir” begins on January 17th. To register, go to http://store.writersleague.org/writingpracticememoir.aspx.
Wishing you all a wonderful new year. Rest, eat well, and write.
Saundra
It is mid-December and we’re in the middle of a cold snap, unusual weather for Austin, the temps dipping below freezing for the second day in a row. I am sitting at the Triumph Café on Anderson Avenue, having just finished eating an enormous plate of curried vegetables. I have discovered that if I come here after the lunch hour, around 2:00, it is quiet, and I can eat and write in peace. The surroundings are less than elegant, but there is good light here and no loud music, no music at all in fact, which I appreciate in this age where every retail and dining experience requires a soundtrack.
I am thinking about how 2008 started for me, in a state of total burnout. I remember being in New York in January, sitting at an Au Bon Pain, a few blocks north of Houston Street on the East Side. I was in between appointments with a large chunk of time to kill. My energy was fading and I decided to stop for lunch before heading to the New Museum in the Bowery. I ducked into the familiar chain restaurant and bought some lentil soup and a chunk of bread. I sat down at a Formica table, propped my feet up on the chair next to me, and ate. When I was finished, I returned to the counter and bought an enormous cup of coffee, enough I thought to jolt me back to life and get me through a museum visit and my 5:00 appointment. I emptied the cup, but I felt more tired than before. I thought about returning to my friend’s apartment and taking a nap—I’d have enough time if I got in a cab—but an old familiar voice told me to press on. I should make good use of my time. I’m in New York. I should see some art. I shouldn’t waste my time sleeping. And so I pressed on, going back to the streets on legs that felt like they might break and with a foggy head.
I had been reluctant to go on this trip. The fatigue had set in earlier in the month when I was visiting my family in California. In the mornings, after drinking my requisite two cups of Earl Gray tea, I found myself stopping at Starbuck’s for an extra lift. It crossed my mind that I could stay home for a change, stop running off to more interesting parts of the country. I knew it would be cold in New York and, even though I had bought a beautiful new coat in San Francisco, I dreaded that achy, icy feeling you get at night when you’re tired and cold. And then my beloved cousin, Robert Friedenthal, died just a few days prior to my leaving. I wanted to pull inward and grieve for him, pour over my memories in peace. But I had important interviews planned. One of them had been particularly hard to pin down. I knew I had to go and I knew the toll it would take on me.
When I returned from my trip I was sick, a stomach bug that I had a difficult time recovering from. I lay in bed for a week and although my appetite eventually returned, my energy did not. I knew what it was. I had it once before: adrenal fatigue, which I recognized from the unmistakable feeling that I might be dying. I know that sounds dramatic, but ask anyone who has suffered from it and they will tell you the same thing.
I saw my nurse practitioner and I saw my acupuncturist. They both prescribed rest, which wasn’t difficult considering I could barely haul my butt out of bed. But it was also frustrating. I wanted to work on my book, to make measurable progress, and I had no stamina. Anxious to get on with it, I sought the services of my friend Carolyn Scarborough, who had recently become a life coach. During our first conversation Carolyn surmised that I was working on the rewards system, meaning that I would write a certain amount each day and then reward myself with something pleasurable, like a walk or trip to the florist. Except I was leaving out the rewards. To rectify the situation, Carolyn gave me an outrageous suggestion.
“Why not reward yourself first,” she said, “and see how that radiates.”
Radiates? What the heck did that mean?
“Why don’t you see what happens when you take care of yourself first and see how that affects your attitude toward writing and taking care of your family?”
Taking care of my family? That wasn’t what I was getting help for. I didn’t feel like doing that. I wanted to work on my book, make forward progress, move on, get things done, watch manuscript pages pile up on my desk, not serve three square meals a day, make the beds, whistle while I work, etc.
“Why don’t you just try it?” she said. “It will be your homework for the week. We can talk about it more next Monday.”
And so I did what she suggested. In the mornings, when my husband and daughter left the house, I crawled back into bed with a book. Some days I took magazines into bed and cut out pictures of homes and gardens and other things that looked appealing to me and pasted them in a scrapbook. I took long baths with sage oil I bought in Taos, and sat meditation every morning. I stared out the window and thought about my sweet cousin. And I took a lot of naps. I tried to eat good food (my acupuncturist was pushing greens) and I cut back on caffeine.
And the results? It was a very good year. In 2008 I began teaching again. I started with a few three-hour workshops and they have blossomed into longer courses and a full-day retreat that will take place this spring. I also reinstated my newsletter and showed myself that I was still capable of meeting monthly deadlines. And the most satisfying piece of all: I found a structure for my book. After almost ten years of searching, it fell into my lap.
My attitude toward my family has improved. On days when I’ve had time to myself, I appreciate their company. I still don’t feel like cleaning up the crap they leave around the house, but that’s a different issue that doesn’t have anything to do with writing—I don’t think. If I find some way to tie it all together, I’ll let you know.
Once a week, my husband’s parents have dinner at our house. For years, my mother-in-law has been telling me to slow down. “You look tired,” she says. “You need to put your feet up.” Sure, I’d think, like I have time for that. Lately, at the end of an evening when she is about to leave the house, she takes me by the shoulders and looks into my face. “Take care of yourself,” she says. “And God will take care of you.” It’s a Yiddish proverb, which my father-in-law repeats for me in the old language: “Dee heet zech oop un Gott vell deer heeten.” I’m finally beginning to understand.
This month’s quotation:
An artist must have downtime, time to do nothing. Defending our right to such time takes courage, conviction, and resiliency. Such time, space, and quiet will strike our family and friends as withdrawal from them. It is.
Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
Writing Topic: Rest
To find out about Carolyn Scarborough’s coaching practice for writers, see her website: www.backyardpearls.com. Her recent blog posts have tips and reflections for writers. Carolyn’s book, Backyard Pearls, a wonderful collection of stories and “pearls of wisdom” from everyday life, is available on Amazon.
Course reminder: “Writing Practice, Memory, and Memoir” begins on January 17th. To register, go to http://store.writersleague.org/writingpracticememoir.aspx.
Wishing you all a wonderful new year. Rest, eat well, and write.
Saundra
This newsletter is sponsored by www.drashpit.com,
a literary theme park for readers and writers. Check it out!
December 2008
December 2008 Newsletter
12/01/2008
Dear Writing Friends,
It is Tuesday afternoon and I am on Fifth Avenue in mid-town Manhattan, somewhere between 42nd Street and Central Park. The sidewalk is crowded with tourists and men with grey hair holding plastic American flags. Metal barricades line the sidewalks and buses move slowly up the street. Inside the buses men and women in uniform wave to passersby. I recall the operator greeting me this morning when I dialed information: “Please hold for your call,” the recorded voice chirped. “And Happy Veterans Day!”
I’ve hit a parade.
Just an hour ago, I had lunch downtown with my friend Barb. She took me to a cozy corner coffee shop where we ate Greek salads by a window. “I like to write here,” she told me. Maybe I’ll write here, too, I thought. I had a few hours until my next appointment. I could order a cup of coffee and stay put for a while. But just as we were paying the bill, I heard the tinkle of my iPhone. There was a text message from my 3:00 appointment asking if we could meet at 4:00—a window of opportunity to see some art. Instead of being still and pouring my thoughts into a notebook in that nice corner by the window, I headed out to the streets to find an exhibition someone had told me about at 49th and Park. Maybe I would write later, when I was done at the gallery.
I said good-bye to Barb and proceeded to the subway station. I got out at 42nd Street and walked the seven blocks uptown and then west to Park Avenue. But when I arrived at the corner, there was no gallery, only banks with big windows and old churches. Maybe I made a mistake, I thought. Maybe the gallery was on Fifth Avenue. I kept walking but I did not find the gallery. I did see a Starbuck’s, however, at which I point I thought I might salvage the afternoon by writing. But it was mobbed inside. Noisy and no place to sit. So I kept walking and that’s when I bumped into this parade.
All along Fifth Avenue ROTC students in dark green uniforms and cadet hats are racing to stay with their group. They are headed north, perhaps to greet the veterans at the end of their run. Walking beside them is like swimming with a school of fish. They move in and out of their line, all their energy focused on staying together. I can’t get away from them, and I can’t find a coffee shop. My feet hurt and my head aches and I just want to sit down.
I used to work in this neighborhood and knew several haunts where I could get out of the mid-town pedestrian traffic and put up my feet. Now I can only find cheap clothing stores. As I approach each side street I peer around the corner, praying for a neon sign that will bring me rest and caffeine. I have in mind some quiet café that sells cappuccinos and plays classical music. But these don’t exist anymore, at least not in mid-town. I think about what it must be like to be homeless, how in the city you have to keep moving or you’ll be stepped on or swept away. I’m done with this town, I think, or at the very least this part of town. I vow never to come back this way. And then I see the entrance to Trump Tower, the lobby gleaming with gold. I know there are shops inside and where there are shops, there are places to eat and drink. I duck in and discover the gaudy old palace with marble walls and mirrors now houses a Starbucks on the second floor.
I ride the escalator up and find the tables filled with young mothers and nannies bent over baby strollers. A couple of young men in pullover sweaters are asleep in the armchairs. I don’t see a place to sit, but at this point I don’t care. I’m getting a cup of coffee. The line is long but I take the opportunity to scout the tables for folks who might be finishing up their drinks. Just as the cashier hands me my change, a table opens up. I am saved.
The table is tall and my feet dangle from the high stool, but just getting off my feet feels like heaven. I clear the crumbs off the table with the back of my arm and pull out my notebook. I begin to write, recording the details of the interior. Suddenly Trump Tower is Eden. The tall atrium is open and spacious, a welcome relief from the crowded city streets. I note the pink marble wall with the waterfall streaming down it. The sound of it soothes. I say how I feel—tired—although as I write I feel my energy return. It is always like this. I start where I am and say what I see. I tell how I feel and I am alive to myself and my world. It is the most perfect pleasure.
I write for only ten minutes—I’ve got to make my 4:00 appointment—but I am refreshed and ready to return to the streets. I move swiftly with the crowd now, bolstered by the forward motion of the foot traffic and the caffeine. Maybe it’s worth coming back here after all. As long as I can find a place to write, I will go almost anywhere.
Quotation:
In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write.
Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones
Writing Topics:
Homeless
On the streets
Upcoming Courses at the Writers’ League of Texas:
Writing Practice, Memory, and Memoir.
January 17, 31, February 7, 14, March 17, 28.
For years I’ve been dreaming of a class using writing practice to excavate material for memoir. With Natalie Goldberg coming to Austin in March to promote the paperback edition of Old Friend From Faraway: The Practice of Writing Memoir, we have the perfect opportunity. Between January 17th, when the class begins, and March 28th, when it ends, we will work through Old Friend, finishing all the exercises in the book in time for Natalie’s visit. We will also study several short memoir pieces to get some ideas for organizing our newfound material. Come on down to the League this spring and write like crazy!
Writing Practice Retreat
April 25th. Location to be announced.
Spend the day immersed in writing practice. Sit meditation, write in your notebook, and dive deeply into your writing dreams. There will be time for instruction and writing together, as well as time to write on your own. For alumni of my classes, this is a chance to deepen your writing practice. For new students, the retreat will jump-start your writing and launch you into this amazing practice.
Registration information forthcoming from the League!
Other News:
I have blog post on a great new website for writers. Check out www.drashpit.com. Great topics are posted weekly, which you can use as writing prompts and/or write to submit submit. The 350 word limit is fun and challenging!
December is a busy month. Let your writing keep you connected to yourself.
Best regards,
Saundra
November 2008
November 2008 Newsletter
11/01/2008
Dear Writing Friends,
A few weeks ago I had a dream that I arrived in Taos for a winter writing retreat and neglected to pack warm clothes. When I got to my room and opened my suitcase, I found neatly folded shorts and several swimming suits, but no socks or sweaters or winter coat. I also forgot to pack a notebook. Living in Austin, it is sometimes difficult to remember what cold air actually feels like, and occasionally I arrive in other parts of the country with serious wardrobe deficiencies. I actually did have to buy a winter coat a few years ago in Taos because I hadn’t anticipated snow in October. But my dream had nothing to do with packing or the weather in New Mexico. The dream was about not being prepared—or more accurately, fear of not being prepared.
Prior to the dream, I received an invitation to participate in a panel at the Neuberger Museum. The subject of the panel would be the feminist sculptor and performance artist, Hannah Wilke, who happens to be the subject of the book I’m writing. You might think I’d feel comfortable talking about Wilke in any format, as I’ve been studying and writing about her art for over fifteen years. But when I saw that the list of potential topics included, “a focused theoretical treatment of essentialism apparent in Wilke’s work,” I decided the panel was not for me. I walked away from theoretical treatments of anything when I left academe over ten years ago. Even if I wanted to participate in such a discussion, I didn’t think I could retrieve from my aging memory banks any of the critical theory I had learned in graduate school. In short, I didn’t think I’d fit in.
I began composing an e-mail to Tracy Fitzpatrick, the curator who invited me, explaining that I was more of a writer than an art historian now, that I no longer participated in the academic art world, thank you very much, and good luck with your panel. After giving it some thought, however, I decided I’d better call rather than risk sounding snooty in an e-mail.
Within a few seconds of talking to her, I felt completely comfortable with Tracy. Before getting anywhere near the subject of the panel, we bonded over our children—a subject I could discuss without consulting Derrida or Foucault. And then, in the most down-to-earth manner, she let me know that she really wanted me to participate. She knew my previous work on Wilke and believed I’d have something to contribute.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Even though I’m still writing about Hannah, my book is more literary than art historical, more of a memoir than a standard art survey.” Without skipping a beat, Tracy said that would be a plus.
“You’ll bring a different perspective,” she said. “That will be refreshing.” She also said she didn’t want a hard-core discussion of feminist theory. As our conversation continued, I felt my shoulders relax. Maybe I could walk back into the art world exactly as I was. Maybe I could return as myself.
I keep a quotation on my desk from the 25th anniversary copy of Writing Down the Bones: “Once you connect with your mind,” it says, “you are who you are and you’re free.” After twelve years of writing practice, maybe I was finally free. Writing about Hannah Wilke in the privacy of my notebook, peeling away the layers of academic armor I acquired studying art history, I had come to the truth of why I was drawn to her—and it was personal. When I looked into Wilke’s eyes staring back at me from her photographs, I recognized my own emotions and experiences—of being a woman, living in a woman’s body. I recognized her beauty and sexuality, her suffering and her grief. What I knew about Wilke came to me on the page. It came out of practice and patience and a commitment to the emotional truth.
So why the dream? It probably had to do with the other people Tracy invited to be on the panel. One of them organized the first museum retrospective of Wilke’s work, the only such show to take place during her lifetime, and the other is one of the great matriarchs of feminist art history, whose books inspired me almost twenty years ago to pursue my Ph.D. Even though I was going as myself, my subconscious was reminding me of the company I would be keeping. I would still have to prepare. And so I began going through old papers, looking at published interviews with the artist and re-reading the essays I had written many years ago. That was easy enough. What frightened me were the introductory remarks I would have to prepare, more or less outing myself as a traitor to the art historical tribe.
Tracy had asked the participants to talk for fifteen minutes about our relationship to the material. Of course I would talk about my accomplishments as a graduate student—tracing the evolution of Wilke’s art, making connections between one body of work and another, and putting the work into historical perspective—all of which I still I feel proud. But how to describe the work I did after graduate school when I walked away from the academy to find my voice as a writer, when I went inward to meet myself, as well as outward beyond art and academe? As I was trying to figure out how to explain the shift in my perspective, I discovered an essay by Richard Hugo that resonated with my experience. In “In Defense of Creative-Writing Classes,” Hugo suggests the difference between academic writing and creative writing. “I doubt that academic writing will improve,” he says, “until academics believe Valéry, who said he couldn’t think of anything worse than being right. In much academic writing clarity runs a poor second to invulnerability.” Vulnerability runs rampant in Wilke’s art. To understand it, I had to become vulnerable myself—in the pages of my notebook and now in front of the audience at the Neuberger Museum. And that is still scary.
The panel is on Thursday, November 13th at 6:15 p.m. on the campus of SUNY Purchase. If you are going to be in the New York area, please consider coming. The other panelists will be Griselda Pollock, who as I said before is one of the great matriarchs of feminist art history, and Tom Kochheiser, who organized Wilke’s retrospective. There is also a gorgeous show of Wilke’s work at the Neuberger Museum—curated by Tracy Fitzpatrick—that is definitely worth the one-hour train ride from the city.
This month’s quotation comes from the Richard Hugo essay mentioned above:
When we are told in dozens of insidious ways that our lives don’t matter, we may be forced to insist, often far too loudly, that they do. A creative-writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters. Your life matters all right. It’s all you’ve got for sure, and without it you are dead.
Writing topics: What matters
What scares me
What I’m prepared for/What I’m not prepared for
Have a great month and a wonderful Thanksgiving.
My best to each of you,
Saundra
A few weeks ago I had a dream that I arrived in Taos for a winter writing retreat and neglected to pack warm clothes. When I got to my room and opened my suitcase, I found neatly folded shorts and several swimming suits, but no socks or sweaters or winter coat. I also forgot to pack a notebook. Living in Austin, it is sometimes difficult to remember what cold air actually feels like, and occasionally I arrive in other parts of the country with serious wardrobe deficiencies. I actually did have to buy a winter coat a few years ago in Taos because I hadn’t anticipated snow in October. But my dream had nothing to do with packing or the weather in New Mexico. The dream was about not being prepared—or more accurately, fear of not being prepared.
Prior to the dream, I received an invitation to participate in a panel at the Neuberger Museum. The subject of the panel would be the feminist sculptor and performance artist, Hannah Wilke, who happens to be the subject of the book I’m writing. You might think I’d feel comfortable talking about Wilke in any format, as I’ve been studying and writing about her art for over fifteen years. But when I saw that the list of potential topics included, “a focused theoretical treatment of essentialism apparent in Wilke’s work,” I decided the panel was not for me. I walked away from theoretical treatments of anything when I left academe over ten years ago. Even if I wanted to participate in such a discussion, I didn’t think I could retrieve from my aging memory banks any of the critical theory I had learned in graduate school. In short, I didn’t think I’d fit in.
I began composing an e-mail to Tracy Fitzpatrick, the curator who invited me, explaining that I was more of a writer than an art historian now, that I no longer participated in the academic art world, thank you very much, and good luck with your panel. After giving it some thought, however, I decided I’d better call rather than risk sounding snooty in an e-mail.
Within a few seconds of talking to her, I felt completely comfortable with Tracy. Before getting anywhere near the subject of the panel, we bonded over our children—a subject I could discuss without consulting Derrida or Foucault. And then, in the most down-to-earth manner, she let me know that she really wanted me to participate. She knew my previous work on Wilke and believed I’d have something to contribute.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Even though I’m still writing about Hannah, my book is more literary than art historical, more of a memoir than a standard art survey.” Without skipping a beat, Tracy said that would be a plus.
“You’ll bring a different perspective,” she said. “That will be refreshing.” She also said she didn’t want a hard-core discussion of feminist theory. As our conversation continued, I felt my shoulders relax. Maybe I could walk back into the art world exactly as I was. Maybe I could return as myself.
I keep a quotation on my desk from the 25th anniversary copy of Writing Down the Bones: “Once you connect with your mind,” it says, “you are who you are and you’re free.” After twelve years of writing practice, maybe I was finally free. Writing about Hannah Wilke in the privacy of my notebook, peeling away the layers of academic armor I acquired studying art history, I had come to the truth of why I was drawn to her—and it was personal. When I looked into Wilke’s eyes staring back at me from her photographs, I recognized my own emotions and experiences—of being a woman, living in a woman’s body. I recognized her beauty and sexuality, her suffering and her grief. What I knew about Wilke came to me on the page. It came out of practice and patience and a commitment to the emotional truth.
So why the dream? It probably had to do with the other people Tracy invited to be on the panel. One of them organized the first museum retrospective of Wilke’s work, the only such show to take place during her lifetime, and the other is one of the great matriarchs of feminist art history, whose books inspired me almost twenty years ago to pursue my Ph.D. Even though I was going as myself, my subconscious was reminding me of the company I would be keeping. I would still have to prepare. And so I began going through old papers, looking at published interviews with the artist and re-reading the essays I had written many years ago. That was easy enough. What frightened me were the introductory remarks I would have to prepare, more or less outing myself as a traitor to the art historical tribe.
Tracy had asked the participants to talk for fifteen minutes about our relationship to the material. Of course I would talk about my accomplishments as a graduate student—tracing the evolution of Wilke’s art, making connections between one body of work and another, and putting the work into historical perspective—all of which I still I feel proud. But how to describe the work I did after graduate school when I walked away from the academy to find my voice as a writer, when I went inward to meet myself, as well as outward beyond art and academe? As I was trying to figure out how to explain the shift in my perspective, I discovered an essay by Richard Hugo that resonated with my experience. In “In Defense of Creative-Writing Classes,” Hugo suggests the difference between academic writing and creative writing. “I doubt that academic writing will improve,” he says, “until academics believe Valéry, who said he couldn’t think of anything worse than being right. In much academic writing clarity runs a poor second to invulnerability.” Vulnerability runs rampant in Wilke’s art. To understand it, I had to become vulnerable myself—in the pages of my notebook and now in front of the audience at the Neuberger Museum. And that is still scary.
The panel is on Thursday, November 13th at 6:15 p.m. on the campus of SUNY Purchase. If you are going to be in the New York area, please consider coming. The other panelists will be Griselda Pollock, who as I said before is one of the great matriarchs of feminist art history, and Tom Kochheiser, who organized Wilke’s retrospective. There is also a gorgeous show of Wilke’s work at the Neuberger Museum—curated by Tracy Fitzpatrick—that is definitely worth the one-hour train ride from the city.
This month’s quotation comes from the Richard Hugo essay mentioned above:
When we are told in dozens of insidious ways that our lives don’t matter, we may be forced to insist, often far too loudly, that they do. A creative-writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters. Your life matters all right. It’s all you’ve got for sure, and without it you are dead.
Writing topics: What matters
What scares me
What I’m prepared for/What I’m not prepared for
Have a great month and a wonderful Thanksgiving.
My best to each of you,
Saundra
October 2008
October 2008 Newsletter
10/01/2008
Dear Writing Friends:
It is Wednesday morning and I am sitting on the deck at Pacha, a coffee shop around the corner from my house. No one else has arrived yet this morning, so I am blessedly alone. Music trickles from the speakers above my head, but it is faint and a little tinny, so it doesn’t disturb. I hear cars rushing down Burnet Road, but even that is a comfort today. I am grateful not to be dashing off to work.
Lately I am nostalgic for the early days of my writing life, when I first discovered Writing Down the Bones. I was still working on my doctoral dissertation but once a week, instead of trudging to the Fine Arts Library to beat myself into working, I snuck downtown with a friend to write. We discovered a coffee shop in an old warehouse with velvet-covered divans and fresh-baked scones. With pots of Early Gray tea at our sides, we spent hours moving our hands across the pages of our notebooks and reading to one another. Writing was like a mistress then, something I did off the record and kept secret from my friends and family.
When I finished my dissertation, I did not go on the tenure track. I wanted to be a writer. But before committing myself to any big projects, I gave myself a year to write without direction. I took a few workshops and occasionally accepted short writing assignments (I worked as an art critic for many years), but mostly I sat in cafes and did writing practice, exploring the territory of my mind and my memories. I miss those days when I roamed the city of Austin with my notebook, moving from park bench to coffee shop without the pressure to produce. I’m not sure when the pleasure began to drain out of writing, when it went from mistress to master, but it was probably when I got serious about it and began writing a book—when I gave up writing for pleasure because I was in a hurry to get on with “my work.”
A few weeks ago I began teaching a new class at the Writers’ League of Texas, “Build a Writing Practice.” I wanted to address what you do when you step out of the classroom and into your busy life, what it takes to maintain the energy and enthusiasm you have when you leave class—and what to do when that energy and enthusiasm begins to wane. As a supplement to our monthly meetings, I created a Yahoo Group to stay in touch. To create accountability, I asked everyone to post their writing intentions for the coming weeks, strongly suggesting they set goals that were easy to keep. For the working writers in the class, I recommended as little as two ten-minute writes a week. I also recommended they give themselves a lot of freedom about what they write. I wanted them to know the pleasure of writing for its own sake. And I promised I would work along with them, that we were in this together. I had no idea what a profound effect it would have on my own writing life
After posting my intentions to the group, I took out my calendar and penciled in four dates for writing practice. One day I took my fifth grade teacher as my topic and wound up writing about swimming in the Rio Grande. Because I have some fear around swimming, it has a lot of juice for me. I made a note that this might make a good essay some day, but I left it at that. Another day I started with tomatoes and wound up deep in the territory of my book. Needless to say, I was thrilled for the new material. But it is just as pleasurable to grab a topic and let me mind wander over the page. It doesn’t have to go anywhere. Writing for its own sake gives me energy and that energy is spilling into the rest of my writing life. Writing begets writing.
From past experience I know that there will be days when the writing goes badly, when it is no fun and nothing comes of it. Here is where accountability comes in. I once asked an accountant friend who was knee-deep in a novel how she managed to make so much progress despite her busy life. “You have to keep showing up for yourself,” she said. That’s what practice is about—showing up. You take out your calendar and make your date and proceed as if you are meeting with your best friend or a child who is depending on you.
When my students wrote their intentions, many of them included a commitment to sit meditation. Although I have been emphasizing more meditation in my workshops, I was surprised. But then again, not so surprised. We live in a culture of busyness. Even writing conferences feature sessions on social networking. We want to head fast, fast, fast into a successful writing career. But I have found that if I spend too much time thinking about how to build my “platform,” I forget why I wanted to write in the first place. I left academe because I wanted to slow down, to connect to my mind so I could connect to the world. I wanted to be one of the people who stayed behind and noticed things, who knew the names of the trees that grew in her neighborhood and recognized the seedpods when they fell in the fall.
It is good to have a project to work on, to set goals, and have dreams of success. But it is also good just to be, to sit at a coffee shop on a weekday morning and write for the sheer pleasure of it, to slow down and notice the tired mother and her baby sharing a blueberry muffin, the music on the stereo getting louder, and the traffic slowing down after rush hour as the world settles into its day.
This month’s quotation is a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. It was originally published in her book, Different Ways to Pray. I discovered it in her collection, Words Under the Words.
Daily
These shriveled seeds we plant,
corn kernel, dried bean,
poke into loosened soil,
cover over with measured fingertips
These T-shirts we fold into
perfect white squares
These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips
This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl
This bed whose covers I straighten
Smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket
and nothing hangs out
This envelope I address
so the name balances like a cloud
in the center of the sky
This page I type and retype
This table I dust till the scarred wood shines
This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again
like flags we share, a country so close
no one needs to name it
The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world
Writing topic: Daily
Go out and worship the world with your notebook!
Writing practice retreat at my house on October 26th. More information next week.
My best to all of you,
Saundra
It is Wednesday morning and I am sitting on the deck at Pacha, a coffee shop around the corner from my house. No one else has arrived yet this morning, so I am blessedly alone. Music trickles from the speakers above my head, but it is faint and a little tinny, so it doesn’t disturb. I hear cars rushing down Burnet Road, but even that is a comfort today. I am grateful not to be dashing off to work.
Lately I am nostalgic for the early days of my writing life, when I first discovered Writing Down the Bones. I was still working on my doctoral dissertation but once a week, instead of trudging to the Fine Arts Library to beat myself into working, I snuck downtown with a friend to write. We discovered a coffee shop in an old warehouse with velvet-covered divans and fresh-baked scones. With pots of Early Gray tea at our sides, we spent hours moving our hands across the pages of our notebooks and reading to one another. Writing was like a mistress then, something I did off the record and kept secret from my friends and family.
When I finished my dissertation, I did not go on the tenure track. I wanted to be a writer. But before committing myself to any big projects, I gave myself a year to write without direction. I took a few workshops and occasionally accepted short writing assignments (I worked as an art critic for many years), but mostly I sat in cafes and did writing practice, exploring the territory of my mind and my memories. I miss those days when I roamed the city of Austin with my notebook, moving from park bench to coffee shop without the pressure to produce. I’m not sure when the pleasure began to drain out of writing, when it went from mistress to master, but it was probably when I got serious about it and began writing a book—when I gave up writing for pleasure because I was in a hurry to get on with “my work.”
A few weeks ago I began teaching a new class at the Writers’ League of Texas, “Build a Writing Practice.” I wanted to address what you do when you step out of the classroom and into your busy life, what it takes to maintain the energy and enthusiasm you have when you leave class—and what to do when that energy and enthusiasm begins to wane. As a supplement to our monthly meetings, I created a Yahoo Group to stay in touch. To create accountability, I asked everyone to post their writing intentions for the coming weeks, strongly suggesting they set goals that were easy to keep. For the working writers in the class, I recommended as little as two ten-minute writes a week. I also recommended they give themselves a lot of freedom about what they write. I wanted them to know the pleasure of writing for its own sake. And I promised I would work along with them, that we were in this together. I had no idea what a profound effect it would have on my own writing life
After posting my intentions to the group, I took out my calendar and penciled in four dates for writing practice. One day I took my fifth grade teacher as my topic and wound up writing about swimming in the Rio Grande. Because I have some fear around swimming, it has a lot of juice for me. I made a note that this might make a good essay some day, but I left it at that. Another day I started with tomatoes and wound up deep in the territory of my book. Needless to say, I was thrilled for the new material. But it is just as pleasurable to grab a topic and let me mind wander over the page. It doesn’t have to go anywhere. Writing for its own sake gives me energy and that energy is spilling into the rest of my writing life. Writing begets writing.
From past experience I know that there will be days when the writing goes badly, when it is no fun and nothing comes of it. Here is where accountability comes in. I once asked an accountant friend who was knee-deep in a novel how she managed to make so much progress despite her busy life. “You have to keep showing up for yourself,” she said. That’s what practice is about—showing up. You take out your calendar and make your date and proceed as if you are meeting with your best friend or a child who is depending on you.
When my students wrote their intentions, many of them included a commitment to sit meditation. Although I have been emphasizing more meditation in my workshops, I was surprised. But then again, not so surprised. We live in a culture of busyness. Even writing conferences feature sessions on social networking. We want to head fast, fast, fast into a successful writing career. But I have found that if I spend too much time thinking about how to build my “platform,” I forget why I wanted to write in the first place. I left academe because I wanted to slow down, to connect to my mind so I could connect to the world. I wanted to be one of the people who stayed behind and noticed things, who knew the names of the trees that grew in her neighborhood and recognized the seedpods when they fell in the fall.
It is good to have a project to work on, to set goals, and have dreams of success. But it is also good just to be, to sit at a coffee shop on a weekday morning and write for the sheer pleasure of it, to slow down and notice the tired mother and her baby sharing a blueberry muffin, the music on the stereo getting louder, and the traffic slowing down after rush hour as the world settles into its day.
This month’s quotation is a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. It was originally published in her book, Different Ways to Pray. I discovered it in her collection, Words Under the Words.
Daily
These shriveled seeds we plant,
corn kernel, dried bean,
poke into loosened soil,
cover over with measured fingertips
These T-shirts we fold into
perfect white squares
These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips
This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl
This bed whose covers I straighten
Smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket
and nothing hangs out
This envelope I address
so the name balances like a cloud
in the center of the sky
This page I type and retype
This table I dust till the scarred wood shines
This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again
like flags we share, a country so close
no one needs to name it
The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world
Writing topic: Daily
Go out and worship the world with your notebook!
Writing practice retreat at my house on October 26th. More information next week.
My best to all of you,
Saundra
September 2008
September 2008 Newsletter
09/01/2008
Dear Friends,
A few weeks ago, from August 10th through August 15th, I participated in a silent writing and meditation retreat with Natalie Goldberg titled, “The True Secret of Writing.” After years of poring over writing books and attending classes, not to mention years of intensive study with Natalie, I knew there was no magic formula for writing and that the week would not leave me tearing up pages with gorgeous, well-formed prose for the rest of my life. And so I ignored the workshop title—although that did not stop me from going down the rabbit hole of perfectionism almost immediately.
Unlike previous retreats, I had no chance to transition to the long days of silence and practice. This summer I had almost no time to myself. My 6-year-old daughter was in a musical that took over my life. I spent afternoons and evenings shuttling her to and from rehearsals, shopping for leotards, tap shoes and tights, applying layers of stage make-up to my daughter’s tiny face, and sculpting her bobbed hair into place with thick layers of gel and stick-to-your head hairspray. There were late night dress rehearsals and long afternoons standing in line with other stage moms to get the best seats to see our precious children perform. By the time the show was over, my meditation practice had deteriorated and I had ceased working on my book. I was exhausted, depleted, and out of practice. I was looking forward the week in silence to recover my writing life.
The workshop was held at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, New Mexico—at the end of Morada Lane, pressed up against Indian reservation land, near the foot of Taos Mountain. Surrounded by old cottonwoods and coyotes that sing in the early hours of the morning, it is easy to forget that the town plaza is just a few blocks away. Meals at Mabel Dodge House are home-cooked, fresh, nutritious, and lovingly prepared. And during retreats, students have the grounds to themselves. You can spend the afternoon sitting on a porch swing under the trees and curl up on a couch by the fireplace at night.
Despite the peace of the Mabel Dodge House, I knew from previous retreats that it would take the first full day for my mind to settle down. And like clockwork, on the first evening, the minute I said goodnight to my friends and returned to my room, knowing it would be four full days before I carried on another conversation, my mind went crazy. In the past I dealt with the silence by writing every little neurotic thought I had in my notebook, letting my chattering mind be my constant companion. But this time I knew better and resolved not to repeat the pattern. So that first night I lay in bed and watched my mind go back and forth, replaying the evening’s conversations, thinking of clever rejoinders I might have added and questions I wanted to ask my friends. I had quite the conversation with myself.
Fortunately I had been through this before, and I trusted the structure Natalie had created—sitting meditation, walking meditation, and writing practice. And in the free hours between practice sessions and meals, I napped, sat on the white Adirondack chair outside my room, and walked slowly around the grounds in attempt to anchor myself to the land. By the end of the first day, I felt my mind relax. The only problem was my writing.
I had come to Taos with a list of topics I wanted to write about, subjects I hadn’t had time for over the busy summer. Throughout the first day I attempted several, but each one seemed to lead nowhere. Every time I wrote, it came out crap. I had particularly wanted to write about the night my daughter came to me demanding to know the truth about the tooth fairy. I thought it would make a sad and poignant essay about the gradual loss of childhood imagination and innocence, and the retreat seemed like a good opportunity to get started. I set my timer and wrote “Tooth Fairy” at the top of the page. I began with the image of my daughter lying on my bed with her head at my feet asking if I was the tooth fairy, and went slowly and carefully through the entire conversation, noting the details of my daughter’s demeanor and the loss I felt when I finally told her the truth. But the farther I got, the worse I felt. The writing was dull, the topic boring and trite. A few minutes before my timer beeped, I stopped. I felt so badly, I told myself that in the hours we were not in class, I did not have to write. I could not bear to write any more shit and I could not bear to read it—to myself or to anyone else.
That evening, Natalie and her assistant, Joanne Hunt, led us in slow walking down Penitente Road, where priests used to carry crosses in a re-enactment of the twelve stations. At the end of the road, there is a white cross, as it happens the first cross that Georgia O’Keeffe painted (O’Keeffe was one of many distinguished artists and writers who visited Mabel Dodge in the early part of the century). We gathered in a circle around the cross, surrounded by fields of sage and piñon trees, with Taos Mountain rising behind us. It was cold and quiet and deeply peaceful. On the way back, the sky put on a showy sunset with deep pink and purple clouds.
The next morning I woke early, grateful for the luxury of a private room and the silence. I made a cup of tea, brought my notebook back to bed, and bravely read the previous day’s writing. Most of what I wrote were clearly first attempts at new topics, rambling around my mind for different avenues to pursue. Messy, but by no means horrible. But when I got to the piece on the tooth fairy, I braced myself. I had so wanted to get this moment on paper. To my surprise, it was vivid and connected and captured the poignancy of the moment. The writing was slow, lingering in the details, and alive with our conversation. The only problem was that I stopped short. The last four lines go on and on about how shitty my writing is, how miserable a week I was going to have, and that maybe I shouldn’t be here at all. I put down my notebook and started to laugh. I knew what this was. I had seen it before. Monkey mind had me by the throat and I wasn’t remotely aware of it.
Here was the true secret of writing, something Natalie had to remind me of later in the week: monkey mind is always with us. You can sit down one day and think you wrote the most beautiful prose, only to come back the next and find it was shit. Or monkey mind could be screaming at you all day, leaving you ready to give up writing forever, and you could come back and find something wonderful. That is the point of practicing non-judgment. No good or bad, just writing. Which is not to say that you don’t have to edit your work. You usually do. But in writing practice, you banish the editor and drop down to your creative heart, the truths you hold inside. You do your best to push past monkey mind and say what you have to say. Some days you trick the trickster and run right past him. Other days he holds you by the throat. The true secret of writing is that you keep going. You show up and you write and, regardless of how it goes, you show up again. You keep writing.
This month’s quotation:
Don’t listen to doubt. It leads no place but to pain and negativity. It is the same with your critic who picks at you while you are trying to write. “That’s stupid. Don’t say that. Who do you think you are anyway, trying to be a writer?” Don’t pay attention to these voices. There is nothing helpful there. Instead, have a tenderness and determination toward your writing, a sense of humor and a deep patience that you are doing the right thing. Avoid getting caught by that small gnawing mouse of doubt. See beyond it to the vastness of life and the belief of time and practice. Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones.
Writing Topic: The small, gnawing mouse of doubt.
I am anxious to share more of what I learned on my most recent visit to Taos. Please join me for the following workshops:
Build a Writing Practice, Writers’ League of Texas, 2 to 5 p.m. Saturdays, September 20, October 18, and November 15.
Cost: $149 League members / $209 non-members.
Register online or call 512-499-8914.
Writing Practice Mini-Retreat, Sunday, October 26, 2 – 5 p.m.
Cost: $75
Spaced limited.
To register, contact me at saundra@texas.net.
Have a great month. Keep your hands moving.
Saundra
August 2008
August 2008 Newsletter
08/01/2008
Dear Writing Friends:
I am at Starbucks on North Lamar. It is Tuesday morning and I am deep in the embrace of my favorite grey armchair, my notebook propped on my lap. Jazz plays overhead, and my pen moves across the page to its uneven rhythm. It is a morning like any other morning—except that my 6½-year-old daughter is sitting beside me working on a puzzle and interrupting me every few minutes to see if I’m done. I was looking forward to spending this morning alone. I’ve been going at full speed since last month’s Agents and Editors conference, and my body is telling me to slow down. My joints ache, my head is fuzzy, and a familiar fatigue is settling in. I had planned to meditate this morning, to sit quietly in my writing studio and let my mind rest on the page. But as I was packing my daughter for camp, she threw herself on the living room rug, her derriere high in the air, and she began to wail—after which she rolled around on the floor for several minutes, rubbing her eyes and whining in short, uneven breaths. When she finally calmed down, I was able to extract from her the source of her discontent. She does not like dinosaurs as I much as I thought she did, and therefore the dinosaur camp I had enrolled her for the week was a drag. She did not want to go back.
“Let’s go upstairs and talk to Daddy,” I said smiling, trusting my husband would say just the right thing to send her happily on her way.
The three of us sat on our bed while my husband spoke to my child in his most soothing voice. “Why don’t you give it one more try?” he said softly. “Weren’t you excited about that papier mache project you were going to start today?” At that point my daughter wrapped her arms around me and began sobbing into my neck. And thus we are at Starbucks. Before we left, I made a deal with her. If she kept herself busy while I wrote, I’d buy her some organic vanilla milk and take her swimming after lunch. So we packed our tote bags with notebooks and pens and headed out.
We settled into the grey chairs, and I placed my timer on the table between us, setting it for ten minutes. “No interrupting until it beeps,” I said. And so I am writing, connecting to myself and to my mind moving across the page. I feel my back settle into the cushion behind me, and the air conditioning blowing on my neck. I hear my pen scratching the white paper. I don’t know how much I’ll get done, but I feel good about carving out this small bit of time for myself, and for showing my daughter that I take writing seriously. It is good for your family to see you write, to let them know it is an actual activity that you engage in, that there is labor involved and, perhaps most importantly, that it is a priority for you—especially if you’re a mom.
The conditions this morning are not optimal—I would rather be in my writing studio with gobs of time ahead of me—but I have trained myself to work in ten-minute increments and to write anywhere. I have written on park benches and waiting room sofas while my daughter was getting her hair cut, having her teeth cleaned, and taking tap dancing lessons. I have written at skating rinks, amusement parks, and aquariums. I have written at a table covered with half-eaten fish-and-chips looking over Monterrey Bay, while my husband played games on his Palm Pilot and my daughter drew on a napkin. I have written at the art museum, the children’s museum, and the museum of natural history. And I have written in the grocery store, standing in a long line with my notebook resting on the cart, grabbing the only still moments of the day before Thanksgiving. I crave long stretches of time with leisure to write at will, but that is not on the agenda today. I have negotiated three ten-minute writes, putting off my daughter’s desire for my undivided attention for one half hour. Right here, right now, I can write. One ten-minute write produces 450 words. Three ten-minute writes produces 1350 words, which is not a bad day’s work. The writing won’t come out perfectly, but I’ll have something to tinker with when I sit down to write tomorrow (I have already arranged for the babysitter). And when I head to the pool later, it will be guilt-free because I have accomplished my goals today. I can already feel the cold, chlorinated water on my skin and my daughter’s arms around my neck as she jumps in. I have negotiated an excellent day for both of us.
This month’s quotation:
If you want to write, you finally have to cut through and write. There is no perfect atmosphere, notebook, pen, or desk, so train yourself to be flexible. Natalie Goldberg
Writing Topic:
Where I write
And/or
I write from . . .
If you have written something over the past few months that you would like to share, please send it my way. I’d love to see what y’all are doing. Also, if there is a topic that you would like me to cover, please let me know.
Keep your hands moving.
Saundra
July 2008
July 2008 Newsletter
07/01/2008
Dear Writing Friends:
It is Friday afternoon and I am at the Rojo Red Restaurant of Austin’s Sheraton Hotel, waiting for the opening reception of the annual Agents and Editors conference to begin (the conference is a program of the Writers’ League of Texas). My friends and I find a table near the entrance, throwing down our book bags and sweaters to mark our territory, before heading to the buffet to fill our plates with crackers and cheese. We return quickly, however, because we’ve got great seats and we intend to take advantage of them. From here we can watch everyone enter the reception. Conference attendees, marked by their blue badges, look around nervously, trying to ascertain who the agents are and where they have stationed themselves. Four hundred and fifty writers have signed up for this conference in order to pitch their books to the twenty-one agents and editors who are here and the time to start pitching is now. The agents and editors wear yellow badges and, as each one passes, I make mental notes of who they are and what they look like. I have five friends here who are looking for agents, and I intend to help them in whatever way I can.
This was my third year at the conference. I attended two years ago and, with beginner’s luck on my side and because I happened to meet a woman whose interests dovetailed nicely with the subject of my book, I found an agent. Because I wanted to share with other writers the lessons I had learned, I attended last year as a volunteer. As luck would have it (this conference has been very good to me), I struck up a series of conversations with creative nonfiction guru, Lee Gutkind, who became my mentor and who is now guiding me through the process of further developing my book and proposal, so my agent can actually sell it some day. This year I attended again as a volunteer, again to be helpful, especially to my cadre of friends who were there.
I have to admit I like the rush of energy I get standing in the hotel with all that adrenalin pumping. It’s the opposite of what I feel most days sitting in my silent studio with only my notebook to keep company. It’s energizing to get up in the morning and leave the house for a change, to see and speak with live human beings. When I enter the hotel, I feel the blood rushing though my veins. A lot happens at these conferences. In addition to the masses of already anxious writers fluttering about the hotel trying to get face time with the agents and editors, there are breakout sessions with professionals in the publishing industry. This year there were panels on writing book proposals, building platform on the social web, and how to break into magazines. By the time the conference was over on Sunday afternoon, I had a lot of things to do and think about.
Now I’m having trouble settling down. I have too much information to process and a long to-do list. I have to follow up on the contacts I made, I need to write to my agent and thank her for buying me breakfast, I need to go over the notes I made in the sessions I attended, and I need to explore the opportunities I learned of for building platform and getting publicity for my writing. Oh, and I have to work on my book. I’ve been waking up early—5 a.m., 4 a.m., one morning at 3:15. I can’t sleep for all the ideas and inspiration passing through my brain. I write to my acupuncturist and tell her my adrenals are on overdrive. She suggests the self-care basics—eating small meals at regular intervals, hydration, alone time, exercise, meditation, Rescue Remedy. She offers to mix up some herbs and suggests a massage, which sounds wonderful but I’m so busy with all my conference follow-up, I don’t have time.
I feel far away from the writing life I teach in my workshops. It takes great effort for me to slow down this week. It helps to meditate and to practice my Pilates. Both put me back in my body and breath. And it helps to write. I sit down with my notebook and begin where I am—in my writing studio, looking out at the sycamore tree in my backyard, listening to the call of the mourning doves. As I write, I feel my hand loosen its grip on my pen. My breath slows; my mind opens. This is familiar territory. This is what I do each morning to center myself. I write. I put down in words what I see, hear, think and feel. Before there are books and book proposals, craft and publicity, there is this. Without it, I am lost. Writing practice brings me home, grounds me in the present world. Once I have that, once I know where I am and what I’m feeling, I know what to do next. I pick up my pen and my notebook and begin writing again.
Writing Topic: Where I am.
Quotation: I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it. Natalie Goldberg
Keep your hands moving.
My very best to each and every one of you,
Saundra