What I Did on My Summer Vacation

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image of American Goldfinch by Loren Webster

Writing Lab reconvenes tomorrow after a hiatus of a few weeks — and a break for some members of most of the summer. As we begin our sixth year writing together, I know that one of the things we will talk about — and maybe write about — is what we did over the summer.

Summers are never about getting lots of writing done — not when you have children still living at home and on vacation from school. Not when you decide to take the family to Orlando, or your mother is ill, or and your nephew is getting married, or your kids want to go camping. Or all of those.

Except I did manage to get more writing done this year, and I thought I’d tell you how I did that — just in case your fall is already shaping up to be busy.

  1. I committed to writing every day. Nothing new for me, as you know. (Fifteen minutes counts.) I stepped it up, however, by committing to write one new, original postcard poem every day in August. Some of the poems were pretty awful. Some of them…maybe more can be made out of those. One hopes. During my sojourn in Idaho I wrote some poems that I really like, and my 45 minutes or an hour hidden away each morning, writing, were a really good way to begin my days of camping with four girls, days that were great fun, and exhausting.
  2. I took several mini-retreats. When my sister and her husband took off for exotic locales like Montana and Portland and Arizona, I took advantage of their offer to use their house. One night, or two — it wasn’t two weeks at Yaddo, but just having even a smallish chunk of time in which no one needed me (except my mother, who lives five minutes from my sister) — were a huge bonus. I got up every morning, opened my notebook, and read, reread, scribbled, dreamed. When my friend Carla invited me to join her in Port Townsend for a few days to work on poetry, I took advantage of that, too.
  3. One more thing I did was to carry a small notebook with me — everywhere. I carried it when I walked my dog at Picnic Point beach park, and when I walked in Port Townsend with Carla. I also carried it on a 3-mile walk through the Theler Wetlands in Belfair. (I was inspired by Loren Webster who frequently walks at Theler with his camera, and writes about it at his blog, In a Dark Time…the Eye Begins to See.)
  4. A fourth thing, that (it occurs to me) does not go without saying, and perhaps deserves a little emphasis, is that I was willing to write badly. I had no expectations of what I jotted down in my small notebook. A few notes toward something larger, a description, a piece of overheard conversation. No judgment.

And now that I look at it this way, a pretty good season for writing.

“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.” -Robert Louis Stevenson

If your dreams don’t scare you, they’re not big enough.

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This quote hangs on the wall of my writing cottage. Looking for an image of it on-line, I found this one, in which the quote is credited to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Wondering who the heck that might be, I went searching again and I learned that she is the President of Liberia, and the first democratically elected female head of state on the African continent.

Big dreams!

What Should You Write About?

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I was thinking about how my own little domestic dramas are really not very interesting, compared to massive forest fires and fleeing refugees and headlines in Mumbai or, for that matter, Kentucky.

This led to a kind of depressive, downward spiral (another one), hearing my wonderful father’s voice in my head saying, “Women talk about the dumbest things.” And my spiral had everything to do with having just finished reading an amazing novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk, by Ben Fountain, which has been called “The Catch-22 for the Iraq War.”

So I was thinking that I need a soldier to write about, or at least a forest fire poem, in fact I was listening to NPR and thinking exactly this, when Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac interrupted the news.

When I was in graduate school, I fell into a swoon over Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), author of The Country of the Pointed Firs, and A Country Doctor. Her short story, “A White Heron,” has continued to be a great favorite of mine. My advisers at the time felt her work was too slight for study, and I ended up turning toward Nathaniel Hawthorne. Not that I regretted that choice, but, hearing that today is the anniversary of Jewett’s birth, I thought that I’d share her with you.

Fountain’s novel, with its nineteen-year-old American soldier as protagonist, and a Cowboys football game as backdrop, serves up a sharp contrast to Jewett, who understood why her work was criticized:

 “It seems to me I can furnish the theatre, and show you the actors, and the scenery, and the audience, but there never is any play!. . . I seem to get very bewildered when I try to make these come in for secondary parts. . .I am certain I could not write one of the usual magazine stories. If the editors will take the sketchy kind and people like to read them, is not it as well to do that and do it successfully as to make hopeless efforts to achieve something in another line which runs much higher?” (qtd. in Biography 61).

I found this quote, and the following commentary at womenwriters.net:

“This sort of criticism of Jewett’s work, that it is not plot driven and therefore less than worthy, is one that many of the domestic women writers faced. Somehow because their stories were more about interior actions, or about the relationships and lives of women, rather than about wars and conquests, their work has been viewed as inferior. This is troublesome because in saying these things are inferior we say that the lives of women (our grandmothers, our old aunts, even ourselves today) are inferior. Anyone who has nursed a sick relative or waited for a “seagoing” lover to come home knows that these apparently docile pursuits are anything but dull, and anything but lifeless.”

What should we write about? I don’t think you get to choose. It seems to me, in fact, that your material chooses you. Whether you’re a Ben Fountain or a Sarah Orne Jewett, you have to write about your stuff, or, as Jewett put it, “You must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that.”

The poem at The Writer’s Almanac on this same day (Sept. 3, 2015), “Swimming to New Zealand” by Douglas Goetsch, is also worth a listen to.

The Acrobat’s Success List

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borrowed from https://www.flickr.com/photos/cereal-killer72/2603616192

I had an upsetting experience yesterday. I went to a financial planner with my dear husband, and, as we sat down, he began explaining how precarious our existence is since I have quit my job to be “a writer.” I don’t think he actually put “air quotes” around the words a writer, but he pronounced them as though he might be saying, to join the circus. Over and over he emphasized that I was bringing in “zero income.”

This is, in fact, completely true.

And it does freak me out, too, on occasion. But this morning, remembering how the financial planner began making helpful suggestions (perhaps I could work as a substitute teacher–they make good money!), I am feeling very, very freaked out.

What if my retirement account totals continue plummeting because of current global financial status?

What if, like my mother, I end up needing long-term care? What if my husband needs long-term care?

What if I never sell a novel…no awards…no best-sellers…no movie deals? What if there is never another poetry book? What if I never publish another word?

Somewhere in the midst of all this angst, however, I touched bottom. And I wasn’t on a trapeze, after all. I was more like a swimmer finding the bottom of the pool. I planted my feet, bent my knees, and pushed up, back into oxygen. I gulped in a big, fresh breath. I realized that what I was really doing was procrastinating–not working–and a sure way to never again do any work or experience any success.

As I breathed, I began to remember my strategies for getting work done. One of the strategies is to work for 15 minutes. This, in my opinion, is a little like thinking you are out over your head, then putting your feet down in an unfamiliar pool, only to realize that it’s not that deep. You can stand up! No problem! So I started on my 15 minutes, which turned into 45 minutes before I went into the house to fix myself some breakfast.

Another strategy I remembered, while eating breakfast, comes from a get-organized book I once read: notice the places where what you do is already organized. I am something of a slob and I let clutter accumulate. But where my make-up and hair stuff go in the bathroom? Totally organized. So it is possible for me to be organized. It is not a genetic flaw, pre-determined and impossible to surmount.

So, yes, it is precarious, but here’s my success list (you do not have to read this) around my work, just to remind myself:

  • I have two published books of poems, The Coyotes and My Mom and Sparrow. Three if you count my Carla-published chapbook, Be Careful. 
  • For five years I wrote one-bad-poem a day (you can see my essay about the experience here). And got many of them published, btw. (Some even made money!)
  • From July 27 to August 30 this year I wrote 31 new poems and sent them out as postcards.
  • I facillitate a Writing Lab now going on its sixth year of existence.
  • I have a BA in English, an MFA in Creative Writing, and a Ph.D. in American Literature. I taught American Literature, composition, and creative writing for 25 years!
  • Last week I submitted a short story to Glimmer Train, breaking a long send-out dry spell.
  • I have won three poetry awards (or four?), and I have had five poems nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
  • I have had about 100 poems published in journals, including Blackbird and Calyx and Floating Bridge (Pontoon) and The Sun and Escape into Life.
  • I came in second in both the mainstream-novel and short-story categories in the 2014 PNWA Literary Contest.
  • I have drafted four novels and one is more-or-less finished–I’ve submitted it to two places and will submit it to as many as need be. I will finish the other novels, too.
  • Yesterday morning I took out my poetry submission notebook (for the first time in several years) and began getting ready to do a September send-out (the intention is to submit four or five poems each day of the month to a different journal).

In her book, Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers, Carolyn See has this to say:

“Protect yourself. Be careful whom you tell. Because the last thing on earth people living an ordinary life want to hear about is how you want to be a writer.”

When my dear husband outed me as a writer, I felt something like shame, and something like heartache. It was as if I didn’t want this woman in her office that was all about money to know my secret, my dirty little secret. But it isn’t dirty and it isn’t little and it isn’t a secret.

  • Oh, yeah. And I’ve been blogging since 2009 about my writing life! See? Not a secret! (http://awritersalchemy.blogspot.com/2009/08/summit-creek.html)

It’s going to be okay, Bethany. You can breathe now.