Tag Archives: writing practice

keeping the promises we make to ourselves

good morning this morning. I have the candles lit in the dark inside office space, because I’m up later than I wanted to be and I miss the nighttime writing. How to shift myself back to those early morning hours while also having to be up past 9pm several nights of the week for workshops? Next week is a break week — no workshops while I finish preparing for the spring session — so I could sleep earlier and get up earlier, too. Let’s try it.

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Look out: freewrite is about to ensue. Where can I go with this in twenty minutes? What I miss are the early morning brainstorm writings, when you don’t know what you’re doing there and wonder what possible difference it could make to anyone for you to be making this effort — but you’re making it anyway. Last night I talked with my sweetheart about integrity — I recently read about a definition of integrity which referenced the fact that it grew out of words that mean ‘wholeness.’ She had heard someone define integrity as meaning keeping the promises that we make to ourselves.

If that’s the case, then I’ve been out of my integrity for a long time — or have I? Continue reading

the poetry of the soul’s home

(here I am listening to some of the brilliant writing shared on Sunday)

Good morning on a Tuesday. This morning is bright sun, warming my chilly apartment, is homemade oat & oat flour Irish soda bread, is a happy puppy settled into a sunspot, is the steam from the green and mint tea flourishing into the sunlit space before me. This morning is Cheb i Sabbah radio on Pandora, is time for morning pages at sunrise, is settling back into home after three days in Atlanta. This morning is Rumi and Minnie Bruce Pratt — this is a morning for poems.

What is this morning for you, so far?

I want to tell you about Atlanta, about the home-ness of it for me, and about a quiet Sunday morning in one of the last feminist bookstores in the country, and inviting a group of Atlanta writers to ease–through their writing–into their bodies. Continue reading

an externalized memory

stencil graffiti of a garden archGood morning from the house of crunch and panic. What’s the name of your house today? I’ve got the candles going, the tea all asteep, and got myself up early enough to actually do my morning pages. The pen on the page, the hand moving, the thoughts mustering themselves into order enough that they can fall into sentences or phrases or just semblances of particular letters: that all helps.

I’m in my small writing room that is filled nearly to the gills with old writing notebooks. Where does this want to go today? There are notebooks here from 1992 and 1993 — next year will be the actual twenty-year anniversary of my last assault, the anniversary of my decision to break contact with my stepfather. Continue reading

when it’s time for independence

graffiti of a pocket watch (the hands read just past 12 o'clock) on a green background with a bird hovering, seated, just to the upper leftWhat a good morning is this morning: lovely cool morning air that promises to heat up as the sun fully takes over the evening damp; a puppy who gets to run in the park grass, gets to leap high in the air for her ball; morning pages and candlelight alongside green-anise-cardamom tea.

What happens when it’s time for something new? When it’s time to claim independence from some part of yourself, to allow another part of yourself to rise?

Continue reading

how to fumble more often

graffiti of faces all pressed together in a tube, as the inside of an artery...Good morning good Monday to you — this morning there’s a good weightiness all around me; the world feels solid and maybe not entirely clear but present and necessary and open. The birds are a dawn chorus (thank you for that, Lucretia!), and the candle flickers over the words “Run your finger down the blackness behind my ribcage / make a puzzle of my womb / an alphabet of my fingers” (from the poem, taped to my wall, “Poem,” by Roberta Werdinger). How are you feeling your way into this Monday? What does the week hold in store for you? What are you carrying forward with you from this weekend?

A poem for today:

The Poems I Have Not Written
John Brehm

I’m so wildly unprolific, the poems
I have not written would reach
from here to the California coast
if you laid them end to end.

Continue reading

what stays (part 2)

purple crocus with a bit of snow (shaped like australia!) at its baseThis morning I woke up at four with the puppy standing up right next to my head — I’d been in the middle of a dream, the only bit of which I can remember now involving times that were divisible– preferably by parts of themselves into other parts, like 2:42 or 3:09– and those times being more comfortable than other times — than prime times, I realized, when I woke up and wrote it down; interesting, no? I wonder if she felt me in REM sleep and wanted me back. Or else she just wanted some attention. This was going to be the first morning in more than two weeks that I woke up to an alarm — and then she thwarted that electronic wakening, thank goodness.

good morning good morning to you — how is this day holding you so far?

I snuggled my hands around the pup for a bit, then got out of bed and went to make my tea. I wrote hard for about an hour, letting words for this new project that I began in earnest back at Hedgebrook push down through the pen and onto the paper.

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(nablopomo #24) old fragments

Happy Friday evening — how is this early dark treating you? I’ve been mostly offline today, which is a delight, and makes my hands and neck and back and eyes so happy.

My project for December, which I’ve begun already, is to spend the time needed to go through old notebooks. Right now I’m tackling 2005 and 2006. I took a stack of 12 with me to the cafe this morning. I thought, Well, I’ve got a couple of hours, and, sure, I won’t get through all of these, but I can at least get through a bunch of them. After those two hours, I was just barely through one notebook — these are mostly single-subject, spiral-bound notebooks, of 70 or 100 pages. Oh right — it takes time to read that much.

These notebooks are mostly journaling, not workshop notebooks. It’s like revisiting myself, 6 years ago, re-meeting my obsessions from then, my fears and panics, and what I was doing or attempting in my writing. I took a hilighter with me, sticky notes, and a manila folder.

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(nablopomo #11) 11.11.11 is magic and veterans (thank you)

pisces image, two fishes tail to tail and mouth to mouthGood morning — the puppy just woke up. We’re on a slightly shifted schedule this morning.

Here’s the nablopomo prompt for this morning: It’s 11/11/11. Make three wishes.

I don’t understand the magic around 11/11/11. I mean it’s a fun date, but it seems like there’s more going on for folks. I remember my college roommate, freshman year, lying on her back and waggling her hands and legs at 11:11am one day; she told me it was good luck. I’d never heard of that. The next time I was conscious of 11:11, I followed her lead, and felt ridiculous, but also a little bit hopeful.

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(nablopomo #10) ready for the story they want to tell through me

graffiti of Ganesh, the elephant-head god.Good morning! I’m here again this morning in the chilly dark — it’s time for fuzzy pajama, warm and thick socks, putting the hood up on the hoodie while I’m writing. In the mirror across from me, I look a little like a monk. A sweatshirt-hooded San Francisco monk. There’s a Ganesha batik hanging on the wall just behind me, so in the mirror, there’s Ganesha’s eyes, and then below, there’s my bent head, face lit blue by the computer screen, everything else dark.

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After yesterday’s endless post, I’m going to keep today’s shorter. This morning I finally got back to my novel, put in 1500 words, a good re-entry. It was the first time I’d opened the file since returning from the Tomales Bay workshops. I said I came back charged to do more work with my book, and that’s true — I also came back a bit overwhelmed with how much work/rewriting/going deeper there is ahead of me. It wasn’t a surprise to me, but I got to touch it while I was there, touch the time and effort that was going to be involved in returning to some of the pieces of the novel I’ve already written and opening them up, pushing further in, letting the stories and scenes fall out. The pace, the storytelling: I have to slow it all down. This scares me, too. I like to push it all out, fast, shove the words past you, whether on the page on at the mic, and then maybe you hear one or two things that really stay but there’s not a lot of time for interrogation, for a thorough inspection. What I got at Tomales, what my writing got, was a thorough inspection. These 12 smart, strong women writers told me what I needed to hear: slow down, show us more, let us be in it. (They also said: we care about these characters, we want to read more. That‘s a pretty great thing to hear.) Over the last couple of weeks since getting back, I’ve felt overly confident about my book, and then terrible about it, and I haven’t been able to get back into the story — I’ve been scared.

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everybody is a story

image of women standing around ironing tables, working and talkingThis is one of the quotes I think of when I consider what the Writing Ourselves Whole tagline (restorying our lives) can mean:

“Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don’t do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way wisdom gets passed along, the stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering. Despite the awesome powers of technology, many of us still do not live very well. We may need to listen to each other’s stories once again.”

– Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, from Kitchen Table Wisdom