Writer’s Block

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penI visited Aerogramme Writers’ Studio today to take a look at their feature on Writer’s Block. Not that I’m suffering. I just spent two days in Chehalis, however, and then Sunday waylaid me with its usual demands. So, no writing for three days. And that meant that this morning was hard. Finally, I turned the quarter-hour glass upside down and told myself that surely, SURELY I could read aloud from the manuscript for 15 minutes. Just 15 minutes!

Two hours later, I had made it through the first fifty pages of my manuscript, and I had rewritten several pages of a later chapter.

I left my desk with an assignment to rewrite this line: Pearl gathered her courage. What the hell does that mean? What did I mean when I wrote it down?

Meanwhile, here’s Aerogramme’s quote from writer Jennifer Egan. Click on the link above to read the quotes from 11 other writers.

“I haven’t had trouble with writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, clichéd writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn’t have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments. It seems writer’s block is often a dislike of writing badly and waiting for writing better to happen.” ― Jennifer Egan

We’ve been having a bout of spectacular weather, lightning and thunder, a brief power outage. Lots of rain. It makes a fine sound on the roof, nice to write by.  Especially to write very badly.

Another Soccer Mom Poem…

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Emma’s team, 2011

And so school begins. Emma is in high school now,  my only kid playing soccer this fall. We’re getting Annie outfitted to leave for WWU on Sept. 19th. I am writing every morning.

Meanwhile, I have 302 postcard addresses, only 31 of which I have sent postcards to. So even though August was postcard poetry month, I’m thinking I will keep the postcards going a while longer. Here’s a recent poem:

Sitting in my car, watching my daughter’s soccer practice,
I eat a plum. When I was a child,
we had three varieties of plum in our orchard–
purple, a reddish orange one, and a yellow, the sweetest.
One fall evening we came home from church,
all of us crammed into the Buick station wagon,
and our headlights caught the eyes of a family of raccoons
perched in the plum tree. Of course the yellow plum,
that sweet tree. The girls run across the soccer field.
Sun slants from the horizon, its rays catching
in my daughter’s curls.

 

usjul2012

Twenty-eight years and counting…

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Twenty-eight years ago, on a Sunday afternoon in a park not far from here, we promised to love, honor, and … I think we left out that “obey” bit. Here’s a poem from Linda Pastan to mark the date.

I Married You

by Linda Pastan

I married you
for all the wrong reasons,
charmed by your 
dangerous family history,
by the innocent muscles, bulging
like hidden weapons 
under your shirt,
by your naive ties, the colors
of painted scraps of sunset.

I was charmed too
by your assumptions
about me: my serenity—
that mirror waiting to be cracked,
my flashy acrobatics with knives
in the kitchen.
How wrong we both were
about each other,
and how happy we have been.

– See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19483#sthash.IvwecMIR.dpuf