Oakland, I’m holding you in my heart and bones this morning.
Good mornin’ good mornin’ — the foghorns are going where I am; the streetcleaners, no, the garbagefolks are just coming around to collect the recycling. Those are the noises outside my window just now, that metallic sound of mash into maw, that long and hollow bassoony note. What’s it sound like where you are?
Good morning good morning!
I’ve just had to go replenish my tea — moroccan mint (green with some mint) and nettle and tulsi and anise and cardamom. Today I needed a little bit of everything, I’m throwing in all the bombs, trying to figure out what will land, what will stick, what will help.
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Tagged csc, erotic writing, litquake, procrastination, radical self care!, writing practice
This blog entry has been waiting for three days for me to post it — I get up and do other writing, focus on this book that I’m growing, that I’m, what, that I’m finding the seeds for, letting coalesce through short writes, shitty first drafts (yes thank you Anne Lamott). I’m aware that much of what I’m writing now won’t be in any final draft. That’s ok. May be much of it is groundwork, backstory, allowing me to learn the characters and their lives. They are introducing themselves to me. This is a kind of intimacy.
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Don’t forget that the early bird registration (a 30% discount) for the fall writing workshops (Write Whole and Declaring Our Erotic) ends tomorrow, 9/1! Sign up and join us!
Good morning — Outside the foghorns are going like a bassoon symphony, like a bass chorus.
This is one of those difficult mornings, where the gremlin voices are scampering all over inside my head, under my skin, through the tender places — where I hear, You’re almost 40. What have you done? What can you hope to accomplish? Wouldn’t it be better just to keep sleeping?
In my dream, there was a classroom filled with people, huge but not theater style; some students were in chairs, others were sitting on the floor. There were bookshelves around the edges of the room, stuffed with books, unorganized, homely. We had a Peggy Phelan reader, and were reading a chapter about ontology. I came in late, didn’t have a reader, wasn’t prepared. Maybe we were at my old high school, but no one in the room was familiar to me, and it wasn’t a high school class — this was more advanced.
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Tagged prompts, writing practice
Last night I had a dream that Sophie met another dog, our neighbor dog, and they were fine together — friends. She got some new toys last night, and this morning she’s a little crazy with wanting them. Who can’t understand that?
Happy Thursday morning to you out there. Thanks for being here.
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Said the Poet to the Analyst
My business is words. Words are like labels,
or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
I confess I am only broken by the sources of things;
as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic,
unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings.
I must always forget how one word is able to pick
out another, to manner another, until I have got
something I might have said…
but did not.
Your business is watching my words. But I
admit nothing. I work with my best, for instance,
when I can write my praise for a nickel machine,
that one night in Nevada: telling how the magic jackpot
came clacking three bells out, over the lucky screen.
But if you should say this is something it is not,
then I grow weak, remembering how my hands felt funny
and ridiculous and crowded with all
the believing money.
Anne Sexton
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Tagged poetry, writing practice
“The unconscious is structured like a language” – Jacques Lacan
“We are in no way obliged to deposit our lives in their [the Lacanian fathers’] banks of lack, to consider the constitution of the subject in terms of a drama manglingly restaged, to reinstate again and again the religion of the father.” – Hélène Cixous [1]
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Tagged change, cixous, lacan, theorists, transformative writing, writing practice
Ganesha: Lord of Beginnings, Remover of Obstacles, Patron of Letters...
Good morning & Happy New Year’s Eve!
What a tremendous, educational year 2010 has been! Lots of lessons offered and learned (or, learning). What did 2010 offer you? What will you bring forward with you into 2011 from this year just passing?
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Tagged gratitude, how you can help!, prompts, pronoia, writing practice
(Click the image to see more of Emily Mclaughlin's photos!)
How many times have I written this in the blog recently: there’s so much I want to tell you, and not nearly enough time? I’m sorry to have missed blogging over the last several days! During my trip from Friday early morning to yesterday, I was completely off-line (always kind of amazing).
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Tagged AWA, body empathy, ethics, gratitude, pat schneider, writing practice
Good morning! Are you already drinking water, Bay Area readers? Please stay hydrated — I can hardly believe how hot it got yesterday. We did make it to the ocean, and I got to ride the rip current at Bolinas.
Today’s is supposed to be a VozSutra blog — the practice of voice. This weekend I got to be with writers at the femme conference and spend a bit of time thinking about femme-survivorhood: what’s it mean to be a femmedyke who’s a survivor of sexual trauma? How is our femme identity, our femme self, inflected by our survivor self? How is our experience of being a survivor inflected by also being a queer femme? Enormous questions that could have essay- or book-length responses. We had time for one writing exercise, and someone suggested that I post some additional writing prompts here, so that we could continue our fierce work. I’ve got a bunch more prompts below.
First, I want to talk a bit about freewriting. Here’s something I wrote last year, for a presentation about transformative writing with survivors of sexual trauma at the Power of Words conference: Continue reading
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Tagged femme, freewriting, prompts, survivors, vozsutra, writing practice