Category Archives: writing

Feb25

lost & found

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Lost

Stand still.
The trees before you and the bushes beside you are not lost.
Wherever you are is a place called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

David Wagoner
Traveling Light: COLLECTED AND NEW POEMS (Illinois Poetry)

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Feb23

little fictions & ragged memoirs

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Little Fictions & Ragged Memoirs is the new incarnation of The Journal (and the Deep End).

I am shifting my focus to writing unfolding stories that develop over several weeks or even months.  I have found that I like delivering work to The Journal that is more fully developed.  Some of the stories are fiction and others are short memoirs. The writing is physical, cinematic and experiential.  Think of Alice in Wonderland, Woman in the Dunes with some magic realism and surrealism salted in.

You can receive Little Fictions & Ragged Memoirs as a monthly subscription for $20.  You are free to unsubscribe at any time.  If you are already subscribed you do not need to do anything.

Even if you subscribe in the middle of a story, you will receive that piece from the beginning.

If you would like to give it a go, you can sign up here.

Feb17

shadow dancing

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I have been shadow dancing this morning.  It is a strategy that I suggested to some of my students:   to overcome creative inertia, try dancing around it.  Or diving into it.  Or changing the station.

Dancing around it means that I am doing the opposite of honing in.  I am shifting focus, paying attention to whatever is flickering at the edge of consciousness and being lighter, more fluid and delicate in my physical self.

There is a tendency when writing or working here – in this digital place where we meet – to get stolid, turgic, thick-feeling in the body.  So finding ways to bring in lightness and less density is a good way to shadow dance.

How do you engage your playful body as you are working?

Feb15

the wait

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Guinevere and Jules are waiting for us to finish tea and make their breakfast.  They are moderately patient.  They are confident that breakfast will arrive.

I am waiting for inspiration.  I am impatient.  I am not confident that inspiration will come. For the past couple days I have been feeling a lull, like a surfer out on a flat sea, no wave in sight.

But I am keeping in mind something that Stephen Nachmanovitch said:  Attempts to conquer inertia are by definition, futile.  Start instead from the inertia as a focal point, develop it into a meditation, an exaggerated stillness.  Let heat and momentum arise as a natural reverberation from the stillness.

I know that in dance, stillness is the canvas on which the movement appears.  With my writing have lost some sense of stillness being the place to begin.  I am filling the moment with too much effort, too many gestures, too little breath.  There is also this:

To the mind that is still
the whole universe surrenders.
                                       Buddha