The Phoenix Requires Ashes

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Given my teaching schedule and other commitments, I may not blog every week in 2025, but I am continuing with my project of reading a book of poetry each week. This week I read a collection of poems by Bellingham poet Maureen Sandra Kane, The Phoenix Requires Ashes: Poems for the Journey (Gray Matter Press, Seattle, 2022).

According to her bio, Kane is a former winner of the Sue C. Boynton Poetry Award, and a mental health therapist, interested in and for literacy, homeless youth, health care access, and disability awareness. Judging by her poems, I would like to add to her list of passions: bodies, all things Zen, and madrona trees. Consider these lines:

I believe I would like to be a Madrona in my remaining years:
Comfortable on the edge,
holding fast to the earth without concern for falling.
Knowing how to shed my skin for growth.
Welcoming wind and storms because I need them to become strong.
Embracing soft, exposed flesh,
trusting that new bark always comes.
Growing toward the light wherever it is.

—from “Madrona”

Although many of these poems look back to Covid, others look forward, offering strength to the reader for the fight ahead: “I speak for the sinew that pulls at my bones. / Red and raw—gaping and mawing. / Holding all together, the strength required astounds” (from “Her Body Speaks”). The poems cycle down through isolation, sleepless nights, despair, then up into love, compassion, and an invitation to join life’s dance. Ultimately the message here is one of optimism and hope. In an epigraph borrowed from Neil Allen: “Life is rigged for the good.”

Kitchen Floor

What if I could sweep with delight?
Peer deeply into detritus
to see a microcosm of visitors.
Like how sand under a microscope becomes shells again.
To gather and honor, not just discard.
How many venerated guests have I thrown away?
Remnants of dinners shared together,
cat litter from the old kitty who pains to use the box,
maple leaves from the peaceful refuge of backyard sanctuary.
All here to bring awareness to the macro in the micro
in their quiet, unassuming way.
What if everything could be this delightful
in its own being
as it does nothing but lie silently on the ground?

—Maureen Sandra Kane

“Scan the body, / watch the breath, / notice thinking. // Watch the fear,” Kane advises in “Yes.” Which strikes me as all that is necessary.

You can read more about The Phoenix Requires Ashes, by visiting this page at Kane’s counseling  website: https://www.maureenkanecounseling.com/poetry-book/.

Year’s End

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It is New Year’s Eve — though this will post as January 1. Anyway, just a few thoughts to wrap up 2024 here at A Habit of Writing.

BUYING BOOKS?

Earlier this year, a reader asked me, Where do you find your books? The library, I think I said, or friends give them to me, or people send me a book with a request for a review. Thriftbooks.com is a good source when I need to purchase a book.

Well, forget that. This year I lost my mind and spent a ton of money on poetry books.

I’ve read a couple of these (see pic) — I have reviewed none.

My best excuse is that it was self-soothing behavior. Remember my spring CRI course, “Good Poetry for Hard Times”? Months ago I was already freaked out about the election, about Ukraine and Gaza, about climate change, and so on (and on).

Unsubscribing from a number of news feeds has helped. And poetry has helped. As a nutritionist once said to me, Why do we crave comfort food? Because we need comfort. At least there are no calories involved in reading poetry.

POETRY SUBMISSIONS

Not much to report this year. I began in September to send work out, but it was a half-hearted attempt and has not, so far, resulted in one single acceptance. I can report that I was invited to submit to several venues, and those poems found homes. More in 2025 when they are published.

THE POOR NEGLECTED BLOG

We will not feel too sorry for the blog — I came close to posting every week this year, and wrote a number of book reviews that appeared here, and elsewhere.

I did NOT do a good job keeping up the list of publications (see my CV tab). In March I contacted my webmaster and we made plans for new pictures, some new formatting, etc. — I had high hopes! — and then that fell flat, too. Somehow, the energy never appeared.

Voracious Reading and Writing, in General

I mean, I do after all have a Ph.D. in literature, and — from girlhood on — “reader” has always been the main listing on my calling card. So if this is my year-end brag post I should let you know I read more than poetry. I read mystery novels, of course (research!).

I also read some literary novels: Haven by Emma Donoghue, Hard by a Great Forest by Leo Vardviashvilli, Pearl by Siân Hughes (a debut novel by a poet! it took her 20 or 30 years to write! I think we might be twins separated at birth!), and Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor. I reread Bring Up the Bodies by the late great Hilary Mantel. I’m happy to recommend any of these.

As for writing — that continues, every day. I am within a week or so (maybe a month) of having my second mystery novel ready for beta readers. I’ve also kept up with my poem-a-week practice. (Not that all the poems are “good” poems.) I think I’m on the verge of cobbling together the next poetry book. We will see.

TEACHING / COACHING

Now, this category, I can brag on. I worked with two poets in 2023 and 2024, and each of them has a book coming out, early in 2025. I reviewed John Egbert’s book here. I’ll review the other when I have the final ms. in my hands.

I already mentioned my first Creative Retirement Institute (CRI) class, and I am happy to report that my two proposals for 2025 courses have been accepted.

Winter quarter: “Emily Dickinson in the 21st Century”

Spring Quarter: “May Swenson and Friends”

CRI courses are inexpensive, and the whole catalog is worth a look. I highly recommend them.

My CRI offerings are sort of low-key lit courses, but I’m thinking about running my own zoom writing workshop alongside. I’ll keep the cost very low (in keeping with the doable cost of CRI courses). Contact me soon if you have a specific request about days and times.

Labyrinth at St. Hilda’s / St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church

So that’s it — soon I WILL update the blog, including my list of publications. And you can expect me to be back in 2025 with more reviews of good poetry. For hard times, and for joyful times, too.

Necessary Light

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It is Friday the 13th, probably too late in the day for this to post as 12/13/24, but that’s the date on which I am writing. I have been in a strange, estranged state of late. Not that I haven’t worked. At times I’ve worked obsessively. I made progress on the mystery novel, then I went back and began doing what I always do when I am anxious—rewriting pages that are already good enough.

I have not neglected my practice of writing a poem a week—as I’ve done every week since April of 2020—but the last few poems have felt like exercises. Nothing breaks out.

Rainy and windy days are especially difficult. Walking around the house, I find myself looking for where Pabu might be sleeping, find myself walking around a dog’s food dish and water dish, even though they are no longer there.

I rigorously avoid the news, then binge at 2 a.m. on political substack posts. I think it was Parker Palmer who said, “The mind awake at 2 a.m. is a deranged mind.” That would be my mind.

I decide to write down the titles of all the books I have opened and begun reading this late fall / early winter. I stop listing them when I get to 14.

Not all of this moody circling about is unrelieved. I have kept busy. Friends gift me their extra ticket to the Pacific Northwest Ballet Nutcracker. My daughter drags me to her K-4 school’s Christmas recital. An old friend says, “I’m blue, too, let’s go to the ocean.” (And, wow, does it help.) But I come home to the same difficulties I fled.

My husband has not been well. Nothing grave—just aging. And we’ve been bickering. I want him to slow down. He wants to keep doing everything he is accustomed to doing (installing a heavy door by himself, cleaning the roof of fir needles, driving after dark, etc.). I remind him that I, too, am aging, 68 (!). He cannot bully me to hold up my end of a door I do not have the strength to hold up. (He says, “You’re not aging! You’re young!”)

It has begun growing dark by 3:45, and I remind myself that I’ve always had difficulty this time of year.

I’ve been avoiding blogging—so much for my goal to do 52 blog reviews in 2024. (For this, I forgive myself.) On the 11th, which is the anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s birth, I thought it was time, and would take my mind off my mind. Well, I’ll do it on the 12th, I told myself yesterday. And now it is the 13th.

I read a friend’s substack. She sends me to a post on Radical Acceptance, which I badly need. I see that I’m behind in reading her posts—long, personal essays that ought to be collected in a book—and so I spend the afternoon reading all of her recent posts. I wish I could write something so personal, so dense with emotion and pathos and history. I wish I dared.

What exactly is it that I’m avoiding?

Two books I have been re-reading: Edward Hirsch’s splendid How to Read a Poem (Harcourt, 1999), and Patricia Fargnoli’s Necessary Light (Utah State Univ. Press, 1999). These, perhaps more than anything, help.

“Poetry puts us on the hook [Hirsch writes]—it makes us responsible for what we might otherwise evade in ourselves and in others. It gives us great access to ourselves.”

I wrote this passage into my journal on 16 November and didn’t add the page number. For the last hour, I’ve thumbed back and forth, back and forth through the pages and can’t find it. Plucking it from my journal, retyping it for you, offers a glimmer of understanding. I begin to imagine that I could write about what’s troubling me. It’s a first step.

Meanwhile, this poem from the luminous Patricia Fargnoli:

On Hearing of the Sudden Death of a Friend

The beach bristles with dead
and beautiful things:
slipper shells washed
full of sand,
broken blue mussels,
dried rockweed and kelp;
the sand itself, not the color
I think of when I say sand,
but specks: white finer
than salt, mica-shine,
dark brown,
pepper specks of black.
Beach plums line
the grassy path to the sea,
fuchsia and white,
full of show and radiance.
I’ve set a clam shell
on my writing table,
by the window
that looks over John’s Bay.
In slow-time here,
I am learning to look closely.
The shell has a tiny hole in it,
is limed white as bone.
When someone dies,
where does all
that energy go?
Where does thought go
and attention?
Where does radiance go?
Three sailboats, anchored,
are rocking.
One fishing skiff, white, far off,
motors away from me.

—Patricia Fargnoli, Necessary Light

all photos by Bethany Reid

Books for Writers

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Before I forget, earlier this month I reviewed Martha Silano’s award-winning new book, This One We Call Ours, for Raven Chronicles. You can read the review here.

 

The holidays are upon us, and if you have a writer-friend, perhaps you’re wondering what book you should buy for them. Along these lines of thought, someone asked me to recommend my top 20 writing books, and I felt flummoxed. Only 20?!

What seemed more doable was to tell you about a few of the books, specifically about writing, that I’ve read this year, the ones that left the deepest footprints, the books I am most likely to reread, or to gift to my close friends.

 

THE WAY OF THE FEARLESS WRITER (St. Martin’s, 2022)

I stumbled across The Way of the Fearless Writer: Mindful Wisdom for a Flourishing Writing Life, by Beth Kempton, maybe in March. I picked it up, to begin with, at my local library. After a couple chapters, I ordered my own copy and returned the library’s (with a hearty recommendation to the volunteer at the desk).

In other words, I knew almost immediately that Fearless Writer was a book I had to mark up.

To write in service of the writing, not the ego, is a radical act. (p. 24)

Kempton is a Japanologist, who has also sojourned to China, and somewhere along the way met herself on the path. She invites us to do the same—not to study Japanese or the Tao Te Ching, but to embrace writing as a way of being. The passage quoted above continues:

What if we gathered up all the energy we usually spend worrying about what other people think and poured it into our writing? What if we really lived our lives, moment to moment, and wrote about that? What if we wrote to release what is burning inside us, allowing that to be enough for now? (pp. 24-25)

Kempton arranges her book around three gates (a symbol that has, for some time, spoken to me). When I reached her chapter on the gate of emptiness, my mind flew open. I was sitting in my writing cabin, my old dog snoring beside the door, but I felt, literally, as though I were poised on a threshold, about to embark on an entirely new way of being with my work. What if we wrote in service of the writing, not the ego?

It matters that I began reading this book around the time I was finishing Red Pine’s translations of Tao Yuanming’s poems, and, before I finished Fearless, I saw the Capitol Hill premier of the documentary film about Bill Porter, AKA Red Pine, Dancing with the Dead. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I urge you to see this film, produced by Ward Serrill, and available now on-line; I have watched it three times.) Taken together these texts—these transcendent works of art—were transforming.

(Follow this link to learn more about Beth Kempton.)

 

OUT OF SILENCE, SOUND. OUT OF NOTHING, SOMETHING (Counterpoint, 2023)

What can I say about this wonderful book of writing advice from Susan Griffin, one of the leading eco-feminist writers of our time? Most of the chapters are quite short. Quoted passages from other writers punctuate the author’s chapters (some of my favorites, Grace Paley, Robert Caro, Le Guin). For instance:

Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want. (Ursula K. Le Guin, qtd. on p. 153)

Out of Silence is full of pithy advice about a writer’s work habits, words, sentences, metaphor, pauses, white space. But it’s never only pithy advice:

Creativity is more like a cat than a dog. You can’t order it to come to you. You just have to make yourself available until all of a sudden you find it leaping into your lap. (p. 55)

This sounds overly folksy, but I assure you I’ve underlined and highlighted passages on almost page. I first read this book last year, and I picked it up again in September when election anxiety was trying to do me in. Griffin is a wise, older guide, taking you by the hand, whispering, See, it doesn’t have to be fancy—it’s better if it’s not fancy!

I’ll leave you with this passage, from a chapter titled “Paragraphs”:

At times writers make [craft] choices logically but more often they come to us after immersing ourselves in the subject matter, after breathing the subject in, walking with it, sleeping on it, letting it fit into our dreams, coaxing it phrase by phrase into language. Sometimes, if we have pondered what approach to take for several hours or days or even weeks, the work starts to speak to us. (p. 106)

Let me emphasize one thread between these books. Kempton is concerned about attention: where our attention lies, how to command it, how to follow its lead. So is Griffin: “you will need to learn to pay attention to your own attention” (p. 7).

(To learn more about Susan Griffin, visit her website.)

 

TRUTH IS THE ARROW, MERCY IS THE BOW (Zando, 2024)

This book, by Steven Almond, was pressed on me by a friend. At first I found it … a little too … something. Casual? Comic? I liked it, well enough, but I let it get pushed aside by other books. Recently I picked it up again, and I’m so glad I did. I have called other writers and read passages aloud to them. (His stories about his children—Josie and the dread Babrika!—and about reading children’s books aloud, in particular.)

But there is so much more to this book than Almond’s entertaining and no-bullshit voice (unafraid to write about how to write about sex, unafraid to chronicle his own most humiliating moments as a parent, as a teacher, as a writer). The job of the writer, he tells us, “is to love and mourn” (p. 204). This passage, which is placed at the end of the book, echoes insights threaded throughout, and says it all for me:

We are living in an era of screen addiction and capitalist pornography. As a species, we are squandering the exalted gifts of consciousness, losing our capacity to pay attention, to imagine the suffering of others. You are a part of all of this. It involves you. This is the hard labor we are trying to perform: convincing strangers to translate our specks of ink into stories capable of generating rescue. (p. 230)

What more can I add? “You are all part of this.” Writing is not a retreat or an escape from the world and your responsibility for it. What you write matters. It’s crucial.

(All three books are available at Bookshop.org, your local independent book store, and elsewhere. To learn more about Steve Almond and his books, visit his website.)