October 2008 Newsletter
10/01/2008
Dear Writing Friends:
It is Wednesday morning and I am sitting on the deck at Pacha, a coffee shop around the corner from my house. No one else has arrived yet this morning, so I am blessedly alone. Music trickles from the speakers above my head, but it is faint and a little tinny, so it doesn’t disturb. I hear cars rushing down Burnet Road, but even that is a comfort today. I am grateful not to be dashing off to work.
Lately I am nostalgic for the early days of my writing life, when I first discovered Writing Down the Bones. I was still working on my doctoral dissertation but once a week, instead of trudging to the Fine Arts Library to beat myself into working, I snuck downtown with a friend to write. We discovered a coffee shop in an old warehouse with velvet-covered divans and fresh-baked scones. With pots of Early Gray tea at our sides, we spent hours moving our hands across the pages of our notebooks and reading to one another. Writing was like a mistress then, something I did off the record and kept secret from my friends and family.
When I finished my dissertation, I did not go on the tenure track. I wanted to be a writer. But before committing myself to any big projects, I gave myself a year to write without direction. I took a few workshops and occasionally accepted short writing assignments (I worked as an art critic for many years), but mostly I sat in cafes and did writing practice, exploring the territory of my mind and my memories. I miss those days when I roamed the city of Austin with my notebook, moving from park bench to coffee shop without the pressure to produce. I’m not sure when the pleasure began to drain out of writing, when it went from mistress to master, but it was probably when I got serious about it and began writing a book—when I gave up writing for pleasure because I was in a hurry to get on with “my work.”
A few weeks ago I began teaching a new class at the Writers’ League of Texas, “Build a Writing Practice.” I wanted to address what you do when you step out of the classroom and into your busy life, what it takes to maintain the energy and enthusiasm you have when you leave class—and what to do when that energy and enthusiasm begins to wane. As a supplement to our monthly meetings, I created a Yahoo Group to stay in touch. To create accountability, I asked everyone to post their writing intentions for the coming weeks, strongly suggesting they set goals that were easy to keep. For the working writers in the class, I recommended as little as two ten-minute writes a week. I also recommended they give themselves a lot of freedom about what they write. I wanted them to know the pleasure of writing for its own sake. And I promised I would work along with them, that we were in this together. I had no idea what a profound effect it would have on my own writing life
After posting my intentions to the group, I took out my calendar and penciled in four dates for writing practice. One day I took my fifth grade teacher as my topic and wound up writing about swimming in the Rio Grande. Because I have some fear around swimming, it has a lot of juice for me. I made a note that this might make a good essay some day, but I left it at that. Another day I started with tomatoes and wound up deep in the territory of my book. Needless to say, I was thrilled for the new material. But it is just as pleasurable to grab a topic and let me mind wander over the page. It doesn’t have to go anywhere. Writing for its own sake gives me energy and that energy is spilling into the rest of my writing life. Writing begets writing.
From past experience I know that there will be days when the writing goes badly, when it is no fun and nothing comes of it. Here is where accountability comes in. I once asked an accountant friend who was knee-deep in a novel how she managed to make so much progress despite her busy life. “You have to keep showing up for yourself,” she said. That’s what practice is about—showing up. You take out your calendar and make your date and proceed as if you are meeting with your best friend or a child who is depending on you.
When my students wrote their intentions, many of them included a commitment to sit meditation. Although I have been emphasizing more meditation in my workshops, I was surprised. But then again, not so surprised. We live in a culture of busyness. Even writing conferences feature sessions on social networking. We want to head fast, fast, fast into a successful writing career. But I have found that if I spend too much time thinking about how to build my “platform,” I forget why I wanted to write in the first place. I left academe because I wanted to slow down, to connect to my mind so I could connect to the world. I wanted to be one of the people who stayed behind and noticed things, who knew the names of the trees that grew in her neighborhood and recognized the seedpods when they fell in the fall.
It is good to have a project to work on, to set goals, and have dreams of success. But it is also good just to be, to sit at a coffee shop on a weekday morning and write for the sheer pleasure of it, to slow down and notice the tired mother and her baby sharing a blueberry muffin, the music on the stereo getting louder, and the traffic slowing down after rush hour as the world settles into its day.
This month’s quotation is a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. It was originally published in her book, Different Ways to Pray. I discovered it in her collection, Words Under the Words.
Daily
These shriveled seeds we plant,
corn kernel, dried bean,
poke into loosened soil,
cover over with measured fingertips
These T-shirts we fold into
perfect white squares
These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips
This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl
This bed whose covers I straighten
Smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket
and nothing hangs out
This envelope I address
so the name balances like a cloud
in the center of the sky
This page I type and retype
This table I dust till the scarred wood shines
This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again
like flags we share, a country so close
no one needs to name it
The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world
Writing topic: Daily
Go out and worship the world with your notebook!
Writing practice retreat at my house on October 26th. More information next week.
My best to all of you,
Saundra
It is Wednesday morning and I am sitting on the deck at Pacha, a coffee shop around the corner from my house. No one else has arrived yet this morning, so I am blessedly alone. Music trickles from the speakers above my head, but it is faint and a little tinny, so it doesn’t disturb. I hear cars rushing down Burnet Road, but even that is a comfort today. I am grateful not to be dashing off to work.
Lately I am nostalgic for the early days of my writing life, when I first discovered Writing Down the Bones. I was still working on my doctoral dissertation but once a week, instead of trudging to the Fine Arts Library to beat myself into working, I snuck downtown with a friend to write. We discovered a coffee shop in an old warehouse with velvet-covered divans and fresh-baked scones. With pots of Early Gray tea at our sides, we spent hours moving our hands across the pages of our notebooks and reading to one another. Writing was like a mistress then, something I did off the record and kept secret from my friends and family.
When I finished my dissertation, I did not go on the tenure track. I wanted to be a writer. But before committing myself to any big projects, I gave myself a year to write without direction. I took a few workshops and occasionally accepted short writing assignments (I worked as an art critic for many years), but mostly I sat in cafes and did writing practice, exploring the territory of my mind and my memories. I miss those days when I roamed the city of Austin with my notebook, moving from park bench to coffee shop without the pressure to produce. I’m not sure when the pleasure began to drain out of writing, when it went from mistress to master, but it was probably when I got serious about it and began writing a book—when I gave up writing for pleasure because I was in a hurry to get on with “my work.”
A few weeks ago I began teaching a new class at the Writers’ League of Texas, “Build a Writing Practice.” I wanted to address what you do when you step out of the classroom and into your busy life, what it takes to maintain the energy and enthusiasm you have when you leave class—and what to do when that energy and enthusiasm begins to wane. As a supplement to our monthly meetings, I created a Yahoo Group to stay in touch. To create accountability, I asked everyone to post their writing intentions for the coming weeks, strongly suggesting they set goals that were easy to keep. For the working writers in the class, I recommended as little as two ten-minute writes a week. I also recommended they give themselves a lot of freedom about what they write. I wanted them to know the pleasure of writing for its own sake. And I promised I would work along with them, that we were in this together. I had no idea what a profound effect it would have on my own writing life
After posting my intentions to the group, I took out my calendar and penciled in four dates for writing practice. One day I took my fifth grade teacher as my topic and wound up writing about swimming in the Rio Grande. Because I have some fear around swimming, it has a lot of juice for me. I made a note that this might make a good essay some day, but I left it at that. Another day I started with tomatoes and wound up deep in the territory of my book. Needless to say, I was thrilled for the new material. But it is just as pleasurable to grab a topic and let me mind wander over the page. It doesn’t have to go anywhere. Writing for its own sake gives me energy and that energy is spilling into the rest of my writing life. Writing begets writing.
From past experience I know that there will be days when the writing goes badly, when it is no fun and nothing comes of it. Here is where accountability comes in. I once asked an accountant friend who was knee-deep in a novel how she managed to make so much progress despite her busy life. “You have to keep showing up for yourself,” she said. That’s what practice is about—showing up. You take out your calendar and make your date and proceed as if you are meeting with your best friend or a child who is depending on you.
When my students wrote their intentions, many of them included a commitment to sit meditation. Although I have been emphasizing more meditation in my workshops, I was surprised. But then again, not so surprised. We live in a culture of busyness. Even writing conferences feature sessions on social networking. We want to head fast, fast, fast into a successful writing career. But I have found that if I spend too much time thinking about how to build my “platform,” I forget why I wanted to write in the first place. I left academe because I wanted to slow down, to connect to my mind so I could connect to the world. I wanted to be one of the people who stayed behind and noticed things, who knew the names of the trees that grew in her neighborhood and recognized the seedpods when they fell in the fall.
It is good to have a project to work on, to set goals, and have dreams of success. But it is also good just to be, to sit at a coffee shop on a weekday morning and write for the sheer pleasure of it, to slow down and notice the tired mother and her baby sharing a blueberry muffin, the music on the stereo getting louder, and the traffic slowing down after rush hour as the world settles into its day.
This month’s quotation is a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. It was originally published in her book, Different Ways to Pray. I discovered it in her collection, Words Under the Words.
Daily
These shriveled seeds we plant,
corn kernel, dried bean,
poke into loosened soil,
cover over with measured fingertips
These T-shirts we fold into
perfect white squares
These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips
This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl
This bed whose covers I straighten
Smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket
and nothing hangs out
This envelope I address
so the name balances like a cloud
in the center of the sky
This page I type and retype
This table I dust till the scarred wood shines
This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again
like flags we share, a country so close
no one needs to name it
The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world
Writing topic: Daily
Go out and worship the world with your notebook!
Writing practice retreat at my house on October 26th. More information next week.
My best to all of you,
Saundra