Writing from a Place of Delight

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So, about a week ago I thought I would write a blogpost inspired by Steven Pressfield, about…pain. I copied Pressfield’s recent post and linked it (see bottom of page), and I added this passage from the painter Grant Wood:

“The public does not realize, perhaps, the amount of work that goes into one painting before I begin to set it down on canvas. In my last picture, I spent two months–fourteen hours a day, including Sundays–sketching, making notes, rejecting ideas.” –Grant Wood

It’s all very wise and was meant to encourage me to push through a rough patch. But it really just made me feel  the complete opposite of encouraged. I wanted to go back to bed.

On a whim I googled “DELIGHT,” and it took me straight to J. B. Priestley’s book Delight, published in 1949. Not long ago my husband and I watched the 2018 film of Priestley’s play, An Inspector Calls, so this seemed like one of those synchronicities that we ought to pay attention to. I bought the book, downloaded it, and, well, was delighted.

In the preface, Priestley begins, “I have always been a grumbler.” He goes on to explain the benefits (the delights?) of a good grumble. But then we get 114 short chapters on what delights him: reading detective stories in bed, lighthouses, waking to the smell of bacon, the ironic principle, orchestras tuning up, making stew, departing guests. Some of it is a little dated (the stereoscope, wearing long trousers, and several chapters about the delights of smoking). But it’s also a window into Priestley’s time (1894-1984), bits of a lost world.

I’m rushing off to a task this morning (and finishing it will delight me), but here’s a post from another blog that does a better job than I have time for: https://www.stuckinabook.com/delight-jb-priestley/

And that’s your assignment for this week. Sure, I hope you sometimes push through, dig deep, suffer for your art, but meanwhile: what delights you? I’d love to hear about it.

Deliberate Practice

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About the featured image:

Every day I walk — I’ve walked at least 5 miles a day for 416 days in a row (yes, I’m a little compulsive) — and every day I snap a photo of something. Sometimes I post the photo at Instagram with #gratitude. I’d like to get more consistent about this, and make gratitude, like walking and writing, a daily practice.

Skill, surgeons believe, can be taught. Tenacity cannot….There have now been many studies of elite performers — concert violinists, chess grand masters, professional ice-skaters, mathematicians, and so forth — and the biggest difference researchers find between them and lesser performers is the amount of deliberate practice they’ve accumulated. The most important talent might be the talent for practice itself. –Atul Gawande

#gratitude

A Little Something to Get You Writing

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One of my daughters is moving home temporarily, and cleaning out the bottom story of our house — which includes a mother-in-law kitchen we’ve never really used — has necessitated another attempt to reduce the amount of paper I’ve stored in bins and boxes. I threw away a bunch of old literature assignments, and I found a notebook I kept when Writing Lab was first launched.

Our writing group has a couple of new or newish members, so I thought I’d replicate the first meeting, at which several of us (including me) did not yet have our textbook, Susan Tiberghien‘s One Year to a Writing Life: Twelve Lessons to Deepen Every Writer’s Art and Craft (Marlowe & Company, 2007).

Our first exercise that day was from Heather Sellers’s Page after Page:

  1. IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, LIST 10 THINGS YOU DID YESTERDAY.
  2. IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS (that’s Sellers’s dictum; it’s okay with me if you switch to cursive at this point), WRITE FOR 10 MINUTES (set a timer!) ABOUT ONE ITEM ON YOUR LIST.
  3. We then talked about what it felt like to write in all caps, and agreed that writing in caps slowed us down, and felt a little like drawing the letters. We had to think more, and some people felt frustrated by that. (Note, years later, I did this exercise with a class that included a couple of engineers — they said they always wrote in all caps, and didn’t get the point of it at all.)
  4. Obviously, you can keep at this, tackling each item on the list by turn, or letting one insight or detail from the first free write lead you to a new exploration.

The next exercise was from Tristine Rainer’s Your Life as Story:

  1. On the left hand side of a blank page, write the numbers 1-30 (all the way down the side).
  2. Beside number 1, write I AM BORN.
  3. Now fill in the title chapters for the rest of your life story.
  4. After doing this…though we ran out of time and talked about it instead…the next step is to choose one chapter and break it into 30 more chapters — or, failing that —  people-places-things that the chapter could, conceivably, include.

(I wish I could recover all the nuances of our conversation about this exercise — it was rich!)

I recommended typing up the exercises to prod them into becoming something more (always works for me). Before adjourning, we agreed to meet weekly, and I asked everyone to read Tiberghien’s first chapter, “Journal Writing,” for the following week.

“In the degree that we remember and retell our stories and create new ones we become the authors, the authorities of our own lives.” –Sam Keen

Persimmon Tree and Windfall

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Persimmon Tree

Remember earlier this year when I spent 100 days sending out my work?

Here are two of the results of that blitz, both of which hit my in-box or mailbox this week.

The first is a creative nonfiction essay — “About a Marriage, from A to Zed” — in the superlative Persimmon Tree: an On-line Magazine of the Arts by Women over Sixty. Click HERE to read my essay. The entire on-line issue is free (donations welcome).

“About a Marriage” was featured in the promotional email, with this thumbnail review:

This inventive and constantly intriguing essay does just what the title says. But Bethany Reid’s alphabet is like no other. The referent for each new letter is so unexpected that, by the time she has brought us all the way from A (for anorexia), stopping briefly at F (for Fight or Flight), and S (for Spaghetti, of course), nothing that Z could possibly stand for will surprise us. Or maybe it still can.

As a bonus, when I visited the page, I found comments from three complete strangers. (I guess I can stop saying that only my friends read what I write.)

The Passing of Windfall

The other publication is a print one, and a long-time favorite of mine, Windfall: A Journal of Poetry and Place. It was with genuine sadness that I learned the next issue will be Windfall’s last. “We have never broken even on any issue in twenty years,” the editors admit in their foreword. “Now the costs have risen above our capacity to absorb them.” All I can say is, this is a crying shame.

My subscription ran out on this issue, so I’ll be sending $7 to get the last issue. I hope you’ll consider joining me, and maybe purchasing Fall 2021 or other back-issues as well.

Fall 2021, well worth the cost, features poems from 27 northwest writers — including Christopher Howell, Penelope Scambly Schott, Donna Mendelson, and Carlos Reyes. It ends, as does every issue of Windfall, with an essay about poetry and place, written by editors Bill Siverly and Michael McDowell. (All of the essays are available at their website.) The essay for this issue, “Monuments and Poetry of Place,” included several poems. Here’s one:

Standing beneath the Statue of Sacagawea in Washington Park during the Racial Justice Protests of 2020

“a woman with a party of men is a token of peace” —Captain William Clark, 1805

Bronze traveler with baby on your back,
twenty tons of Oregon copper were mined
to make you. You’re looking beyond me.
From where I stand you’re unreachable.

Across the world people are tumbling
statues, taking down old heroes (now pariahs)
and erecting new ones, renaming buildings,
mascots, boulevards, dreams.

Bird Woman, what do we do with you?
We aren’t sure how to say your name,
we don’t know when you were born or died,
but we know you, a chief’s daughter, were never paid.

What if the Hidatsa had not kidnapped
you and forced you into slavery?
What if your Hidatsa man hadn’t lost at gambling
and traded you to Charbonneau to pay the debt?

Young native sold to white man.
Small woman helping men.
Some might call you traitor.
Some might see you as victim.

You are the axis, pathfinder, key.
Without you there would have been
no horses, no foraging of forest food,
no otter robe, no shared language.

As a girl I played here years ago with my sisters.
On hot August evening we ate barbequed chicken

Washington Park statue of Sacajawea and her baby, from Wikipedia

on paper plates with sweet corn and coleslaw.
Barefoot, we ran circles around you.

Lemhi Shoshone woman, strong swimmer,
cooking camas, keeping peace,
when I walk alone in old forests
of ambiguous shapes, I almost see you.

—Christine Colasurdo

Click on this link to visit Windfall to purchase a copy. You’ll find a form to print out and mail in with your check (beautifully old-school).