Pearl Diver

Make a wish as the oyster opens:
No story will come of it.

The sea is broken and
the salt water is too deep.

No one really knows how to breathe
in the bed the ocean made.

You are on your own.

PROMPT: Magnetic word tiles selected on the basis of what appealed to me that day. (I have LOTS!)

Squirrel Haiku

PROMPT: A rough western equivalent of the Japanese Haiku is a poem of three lines with a syllable pattern of 5-7-5. I used that structure for multiple stanzas on three consecutive days, but I also chose my words from my magnetic tile stash!

1.
Does   he see   me see

him  dig his secret dinner

from my grass and smile?

2.

How to plant seeds so

they feast me   but do not grow?

Maybe the nut knows.

3.
He dances the dirt
as at my window  I spy--

this watch, the day's gift.

Susan Acrostic

Stream
Under
Steel
Answering
Night

PROMPT: Have each person use their first, last or full name to do a name acrostic that helps them introduce themselves to the group. I chose my words using magnetic tiles, which I store sorted in cupcake tins by beginning letters.

If You Want to Write:A Book About Art, Independence and Spirit

by Brenda Ueland

This book first appeared in 1938 when its author was 44 years old. She grew up in Minneapolis, Minn., but lived in Greenwich Village, New York City for a while and rubbed elbows with the likes of Eugene O'Neill. She eventually returned to Minnesota, where she earned a living as a writer, editor and teacher of writing. In her later years, she set an international swimming record for people over-80 and was knighted by the King of Norway. She lived to be 93.

That said, you've likely never heard of Brenda Ueland. I hadn't either until I found a reference to this book in somebody else's book on writing. I liked the excerpt quoted, and I ordered the book. I listed all those quirky tidbits about the author because the book is a bit of a quirk itself. But please understand, I mean that in the most lovely way.

This is a charming, breathless, exuberant book about living in a bigger way as the path to finding the writing life you feel you were always meant to have. The chapter titles alone inspire me: (1) Everybody is talented, original and has something to say; (7) Be careless, reckless! Be a lion, be a pirate, when you write; and finally, (10) Why Women who do too much housework should neglect it for their writing. What's in between the titles is even better!

I initially read this book when I was experiencing a long period of block in my life. Part of dismantling that block involved developing a better understanding of how creativity really works. It isn't "bidden" or "commanded forth" when we are ready to use it, like one knight's sword pulled and pointed at another. Coming from a business and journalism background, that was hard for me to understand. I'd always driven myself, written about things that interested me only mildly or not at all and managed to make them interesting for other people.

But it wore me out after 25 years. Ueland helped. She didn't think much of the ways of business either, and she made me feel much better about my pulling into myself:

So you see the imagination needs moodling--long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering. These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas, such as: "I see where I can make an annual cut of $3.47 in my meat budget." But they have no slow, big ideas....If good ideas do not come at once, or for a long time, do not be troubled at all. Wait for them. Put down the little ideas however insignificant they are. But do not feel, any more, guilty about idleness and solitude. (pp. 32-33)

Mostly, Ueland says, we need to learn to trust ourselves and not judge ourselves, at least not too soon--both principles that fit well with the Amherst Writes & Artists philosophy I teach in my workshops. She suggests we "prime" our imagination each day like a pump, using a splash of solitude and idleness to keep the waters flowing. I couldn't agree more.

With that said, I'll leave off writing. I've got some moodling to attend to. When you get yours in, then and only then, read her book. Finish it only if you absolutely can't put it down. I'm guessing that's the way she'd want it.

Things I Didn't See Today

PROMPT: The title, course! This prompt is actually one you could use over and over with the same writers because each day we miss new things.

I didn't see the ash tree

outside the window where I write.

I didn't notice that its leaves fell weeks before
in a shower of gold that set
the rest of autumn sparking.

Zeus wore such a guise

to visit Danae in her cell, and so
Perseus was conceived.
I had forgotten.

I had forgotten how once
I dreamed a golden shower,
light dancing down into my sleep.
Loosed from the bonds of matter
it free-fell into a purple land.
So long ago it was
I had forgotten how I woke up
feeling warmed by love.

I didn't see the leaves
huddle at the curbs this year,
ready to be swept away and burned
as fuel for the winter to come.

I didn't see the buds

already taking shape on
the undressed branches
of the ash.

Chicken Stock

Chickens don't get
the sweet respect they earn
every day.

It cannot be easy to give up
all those eggs or
to watch their more robust sisters
become someone's dinner.

Free-range, fresh, fluffed,
raw, cleaned, roasted or fried--
the story of their lives
clucks secret sentences
onto makeshift menus
for The Man:

Feel-good fiction to comfort
the breast of friends.

PROMPT: Magnetic word tiles selected on the basis of what appealed to me that day. (I have LOTS!)

On Beauty and Writing the Body's Story: I'ma Be Me!

This morning on The Today Show, comedian Wanda Sykes promoted her new late-night talk show scheduled to air next week on Fox, along with her HBO special "I'ma Be Me," with a joke about how the body erodes as it ages: "I used to carry an extra pair of panties in my purse in case I got lucky. Now it's in case I sneeze!."

Beauty--or the pursuit of it--is always before us: on TV and billboards, in magazines, embedded in how we relate to each other and to ourselves. If we aren't as comfortable in our skin as Sykes claims to be--the reason she gave for the "I'ma Be Me" title--we're going to have some trouble adjusting as we age.

If you've met me, you know I'm a big woman. I've been working on my weight for nearly two years (if you don't count all of my life before that), following the guidelines of a nutritionist in a diabetes clinic. I've lost around 60-70 pounds, and I still have a long way to go.

But a big part of why I started trying was for the first time in my life my cholesterol inched into the high zone and my fasting-glucose registered pre-diabetic. I see an endocrinologist for other issues, and she told me if I did nothing I could expect to become diabetic in about a year.

In spite of my slow weight-loss rate, all the components that make up my cholesterol score now register smack-dab in the middle of normal, as does my fasting-glucose, which in the time I've followed the nutrition guidelines has dropped a full 30 points.

If I keep this up, I may never be what our culture calls thin, but I probably won't be diabetic. And that's okay by me. My doctor is thrilled. She's about five-feet tall and 100 pounds soaking wet, and her response to my complaint about losing so slowly was that the slower it comes off, the more I have made it part of my life, and so the less likely I'll be to gain it back. "That's the right way," she added.

I laughed at Sykes' joke this morning. But I felt a little sorry for my body when I did. After all, it's been through a lot, and it's carried it all pretty well considering. When we hide our pain and hurt over events in our life, our body carries it.

The pain doesn't disappear. When we don't express it, it goes somewhere, believe me, and that somewhere is into our thighs and hips and bellies and hearts and breasts and joints and feet. The body holds on to all our bad memories, as well as our joys, and it goes on and on anyway, carrying us through this life.

Of course it wears down because we push too much onto it. All those times we didn't say what we thought, all those times we let someone push us around, all those times we witnessed a violation of life and said nothing. All those silences speak volumes into the cells of our bodies.

If you think I'm making too much of this, listen to this: I know someone who studies voice. Her teacher often touches or presses on certain parts of her body when they're doing vocal exercises. This is not an invasive process but has to do with making the singer aware of her body and putting it to better use in the production of beautiful sound.

She said that sometimes these touches cause memories to well up. Often they are unpleasant memories. Sometimes tears accompany them. This is the body wanting to speak. This is the body wanting to tell us who is there, in all its facets.

This is the body wanting to make something beautiful out of pain. But first the pain has to come up.

I taught a workshop one time on writing about the body. Participants helped each other draw life-size outlines of their bodies on huge sheets of paper we'd cut from a roll and taped to a wall. We read poems and brief stories about the body, then wrote about our own bodies directly onto our outlines.

All-in-all, the logistics made the workshop difficult. We needed more space to roll out our tracings, and people were shy about their bodies. That's understandable. It's not a workshop I'd do again unless by request, but I'm glad I did it once because I see now how the body each of us wears is a unique story. And it is a dear, dear friend who needs our love and focus.

I'm tired of seeing news items about already thin models being made to look emaciated by "beauty" magazines. I'm tired of hearing Fox News rant about whether or not Michelle Obama has the thighs for shorts. I'm tired of strangers staring at me disapprovingly, as if to make me into the fat shadow of their starving soul.

Michelle Obama is beautiful! Heck, I am beautiful! Have you noticed?-- I look like my poem! (see post below)

In addition to the photo of that poem, I've illustrated this post with a 1631 etching by Rembrandt called "Woman on a Mound." It is referenced in Zadie Smith's work of fiction On Beauty, which is a modern-day retelling of E. M. Forster's novel, Howard's End. In Smith's book, a fresh-faced college freshman from South Bend, IN, named Katie ponders this etching, and though she is a minor character, her insight is anything but:

Katie has read some famous commentaries on this etching. Everybody finds it technically good but visually disgusting. Many famous men are repulsed. A simple naked woman is apparently much more nauseating than Samson having his eye put out or Ganymede pissing everywhere. Is she really so grotesque? She was a shock, to Katie, at first--like a starkly lit, unforgiving photograph of oneself. But then Katie began to notice all the exterior, human information, not explicitly in the frame but implied by what we see there. Katie is moved by the crenulated marks of absent stockings on her legs, the muscles in her arms suggestive of manual labour. That loose belly that has known many babies, that still fresh face that has lured men in the past and may yet lure more. Katie--a stringbean, physically--can even see her own body contained in this body, as if Rembrandt were saying to her, and to all women: 'For you are of the earth, as my nude is, and you will come to this point too, and be blessed if you feel as little shame, as much joy, as she!' This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience--these are the marks of living.

I want you to know the supreme joy of letting your body speak in what you write. Ask it what it thinks. Listen for its replies. And tell. Don't be ashamed. Tell and ask and ask and ask and tell some more. You will never run out of things to write. Your body, as always, will carry you through.