Writing a Postcard

/8 Comments/in , , /by

I’ve been in a funk this summer, and feeling, frankly, as though all this writing is pointless. Aren’t there already enough books in the world? Despite good friends, despite a class in which I was assigned to write one metaphor per day. (Which can also be similes, “This weird funk, purple like Puget Sound at dusk,” or brilliant word substitutions: “A blue funk washed over me.”) Despite walks. Despite baking many loaves of sourdough bread.

But it is August, and that means POPO, or POetry POstcard Fest. I don’t always sign up for August, as I participate in my friend Carla’s February postcards event each year. But this year, August postcards feels like a good idea. Somewhere I have a quote written down, about letting go of expectations and big-picture goals and doing just the one next right thing. The metaphors can be that next right thing; the postcards can be that next right thing.

Carla’s postcard month is about peace — the idea being that if you want more of something in your world, then you can begin by putting more of it into your world. I like the idea of writing all month on a theme, and in February I wrote about peace, but also about my marriage and gratitude. (The original had the word peace embedded in it somewhere.)

Violinist at the Window

—Henri Matisse, 1918

Shades of ochre and orange
make me think of the grapefruit
my husband bought yesterday
at the market, and of the grapefruit spoon,
a Valentine’s Day gift,
used this morning at breakfast.
The song Matisse’s violinist plays
is Chopin, a prelude, or maybe a nocturne,
and those make me think, too,
of my husband. Notes lifting
from the violin, both sweet and tart.

–Bethany Reid

This morning, in my attempts to distract myself, I drifted over to a couple favorite blogs: one being Rita’s Notebook,  the other, photographer Loren Webster’s In a Dark Time… After reading other people’s words, I can tell myself, “See, someone is reading. It does matter.” You don’t have to be Stephen King or James Patterson to have readers.

Then I visited my old blog, One Bad Poem, and reread posts from around the time of my father’s death. I had a houseful of teenagers! And I was teaching! And I kept writing! Gratitude was splashing all over me. So many farm pictures, so many stories and scraps of poems…

When you write a poem on a postcard and mail it, you know that you have at least one reader.

So this August, in addition to wanting a little more kindness and generosity toward my own writing life (from me, I mean), I’m asking myself, what else do you want more of in the world, Bethany? That’s what I’ll be writing about. And so here I am, writing it down again, and feeling grateful for you, reading these words (grateful for comments and emails, too).

Next, another loaf of sourdough bread.

Our Deepest Calling

/1 Comment/in , , , /by

To register for the book launch of Our Deepest Calling, Saturday, April 17, at 4 p.m. , follow this link: https://www.villagebooks.com/event/litlive-chuckanut-sandstone-0401721. (And if you are wondering where the images are in this post, for some reason today I’m not able to upload new ones.)

Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks—we will also find our path of authentic service in the world.”

—Parker Palmer

Thanks to Village Books in Fairhaven—and Zoom—tomorrow at 4 p.m. my writing group will be celebrating the publication of a collection of poetry and prose written during our first ten years together. Our Deepest Calling is also available for purchase through Village Books ($16 and $1 shipping).

I’m taking a day off from writing something new for the blog, and reproducing here my introduction to Our Deepest Calling (fleshing it out a bit for people not familiar with the context given in my co-editor’s intro), followed by a sampling of poems. The book also includes short essays and an excerpt from a novel in progress.

“I learned how to write in the interstices of daily life.”

—Maxine Kumin

In 2010, when my dear friend Paul Marshall asked me if I would lead a Teaching Lab under the auspices of the Teaching and Learning Cooperative at Everett Community College, my first response was “oh, no.” That evening after supper and homework, one of my teenaged daughters had a meltdown over a boyfriend; another was fighting with her best friend; the ten-year-old didn’t want to go to bed; and my sister called to tell me that I really really needed to help out more with our aging parents. The next morning, instead of retreating into the pages of my journal, I graded a set of student papers. Then I thought, What if we called it a Teaching Lab, but wrote instead?

Our first meeting attracted a couple dozen people from across campus—staff, faculty, and even administrators. It was wild. In my recollection, we were before too long half that number, and soon we were only eight or so souls. No matter, we were committed. Our first year we worked through Susan M. Tiberghien’s One Year to a Writing Life: Twelve Lessons to Deepen Every Writer’s Art and Craft. By the second year, we all had our own projects underway and settled into a routine of just writing. Some of our colleagues were skeptical, to put it mildly: What are you doing in there, and what does it have to do with teaching?

To my mind, the Writing Lab had everything to do with…everything. Our sessions were only ninety minutes once a week—but that bit of time and each other’s encouragement were all we needed to keep the flame of our writing, questing and questioning lives burning.

Ten years ago, I was immersed in the daily catastrophe of full-time teaching and raising a family. Now that I’m retired from the college and my daughters are grown and out of the house, now that my parents have passed on, I have more time, or so I tell myself. Other group members have gone through similar transitions, all of which are reflected in our writings, no matter if we write of fortune cookies, jump ropes, or imaginary trysts with former U. S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins.

Then along comes 2020 with new challenges, and its catastrophes on a global scale. Our writing group is now even more important to me, as we have over the years become a group of friends who listen deeply to one another and among whom we know we will be heard.

“Oh friends, where can one find a partner for the long dance over the fields?”

—William Stafford, from A Walk in the Country

I should add that, since moving ourselves off-campus to Rosehill Community Center near the Mukilteo Ferry Dock (and, this past year, to Zoom), we have morphed into an eclectic bunch of former EvCC people and community members. One of these is the award-winning artist Janet Hamilton, whose painting, “Madrona Concerto,” graces our cover.

Here is a poem from co-editor (and Zoom-master) Carla Shafer:

Ancestors

Because my family has lived on stolen tribal
lands in the northwest since I was born, I listen
to the bending of the trees, follow the paths
of salmon and walk days short in winter and
long in summer. This is not the place of my
ancestors. This is not Bohemia or Baden-Baden.
It is not the Nebraska plains or Kansas prairies.
I am not at the source of my great-grandparents’
imaginings, but their touch is in my hand, their
hopes carried in my heart, their steps are known
just as the salmon wiggles a fin,
and in the sway of a cedar bough.

My grandsons, living near, speak Japanese, the language
of their mother’s family, celebrate Children’s Day
and imagine beyond boundaries and borders. My
daughter’s child will speak Hindi and Urdu,
celebrate Eid al Fitr. Their paths of succession will move
through hazards in shadow and light. They will view
stars across generations who have danced
on the same side of the moon. Their ancestors
traced in their steps, in the twinkle of their eyes,
in the embrace of what comes next, beneath the flight
of peregrine falcons, above waters where Orcas swim.

—Carla Shafer

My Slow Christmas

/1 Comment/in , , /by

I’ve mentioned before how much difficulty I’ve had getting into the spirit of the season. I know I’m not alone. And I have been “busy.” Aside from obsessing about politics (looking forward to having it all take a back seat–as David Brooks has promised), I have several different writing projects going.

And I’ve been acting “as if“: sending out a massive amount of Christmas cards, sneaking in some shopping and trying to organize gifts for my daughters to pick up at the house. I’ve been negotiating our Boxing Day Zoom for opening gifts (as our youngest daughter is working today and tomorrow). I’ve been hanging out with my old dog. I’ve kept up with my goal to walk 5 miles a day. On the Solstice, given torrential rain, and snow (!), I did almost the entire 5 miles inside the house. (Pabu and I did make it outside for a bit in the early evening–a Tibetan Terrier, he likes snow.)

But now it’s Christmas Eve, and I’m feeling that maybe an Ann Cleeves’s novel and some tea and shortbread are in order. Even if I can’t get the picture to shift.

One of the gifts I splurged on for myself recently was to sign up for BookFox’s “Master Your Writing Time” course. I’m dawdling my way through it, but finding–despite my best efforts, or the opposite–that it has helped. Some of the lessons are action tips, and adopting the Pomodoro method has worked beautifully for me. Sitting for very long makes me feel achy and stiff. But working for just 25 minutes, then spending 5 minutes moving around, doing a few chores (avoiding my phone & computer), has been pretty amazing.

Then I came to his lesson “Hasty Writing vs. Slow Writing.” As a huge fan of Louise DeSalvo, I was already primed for what Matthew Fox called a “mindset” lesson. It ended with a link to the blogpost below.

I’ll still find a way to walk my 5 miles today. But I wish us both a slow Christmas.

A Manifesto for Slow Writing

Writing Will Save Your Life

/1 Comment/in , /by

I’m in a mood today for dramatizing. Will writing save your life? All I know is that it saved mine and I’ve made it my business to try to understand how writing saved me, and how it can keep saving me. Louise DeSalvo has been one of my mentors—not that I know her, personally, but I’ve read her book, Writing as a Way of Healing, about 100 times. DeSalvo doesn’t flinch from the difficult, in fact, that’s exactly what she goes after:

Writing about traumatic or troubling life experiences initially unleashes difficult, conflicting emotions. In the long run, though, we feel better emotionally and are healthier and achieve a level of understanding of our lives that only writing can provide. Safe writing—writing what we already know or understand, writing that is superficial—won’t help us grow, either as people or as writers. For our writing to be healing, we must encounter something that puzzles, confuses, troubles, or pains us. (p. 93).

And that’s why you don’t get to go back to bed and sleep through the next six week news cycle.

I recently came across this KUOW story about poet Colleen J. McElroy and wanted to share it—she’s a walking, breathing example of writing’s power to sustain us. (Click on the link to go to the story/video.)

Hunkered down at 85

Colleen J. McElroy

DeSalvo continues:

An outgrowth of the kind of writing that digs deep, that takes risks, that arises from our desire to explore the unresolved emotional puzzles or ongoing pain in our lives is that we “gain greater psychological freedom” (as Albert M. Rothenberg, M.D., has observed) and greater range and depth in our artistic expression… (p.92)

I can’t imagine living any other way.