Northwest Inland Writing Project Summer Writing Retreat: Day 1

For the second straight summer, I've served as the Visiting Writer for the Northwest Inland Writing Project's summer writing retreat. I've decided to make a record of what I presented at this year's retreat so that if I'm asked, somewhere down the road, about my presentations and prompts, I'll be able to consult my blog. When I was the Visiting Writer in 2008, I was tired from the school year that had just ended and my car breaking down in La Grande -- you can read about my misadventure, here -- and my fatigue erased my memories of what happened that year. Here's the beginning of my 2009 experience.

To open the retreat and to build a foundation for the rest of the week, I laid out four principles that, to me, are foundational to any writing anyone might do. Here they are:

1. Be yourself. No writer wants to be pushed around; writers want to work with their own voices and their own styles. Writers create their own rules. They do what works. Writing teachers who impose their own ways of writing upon others are failing those they teach. Trust your ways of putting words together, trust how you hear words, trust how you shape words and sounds. Trust that you can make what you experience into shared experience – whether your experience is what has happened, what you’ve dreamed, what you’ve thought, what you believe, what you wish were true, what you wished had happened, what you imagine. . . or however you experience things….you must come to trust you can use words to bring your experience alive for a reader or listener who have never experienced it quite the way you did.

2. Writing is largely a matter of being awake and receptive. I don't regard writing as a special gift. We are all conscious. To write, we have to be awake and pay attention, especially with our senses. Our bodies need to be awake, as well as our minds. At the same time, we need to develop a vocabulary that suits what we see and experience and think and feel.

3. Let it rip. Writers should always feel free to explore copiously the subjects of their writing in as much variety and with as much freedom as possible. Writers should always feel at liberty to write off the subject, to explore the many tributaries of the main river of an idea. This is what makes the brain happy! In my years of working with writers, and my experience writing, the most imposing obstacles are fear and harsh self-criticism. Let it rip and you begin to find yourself saying, “Get thee behind me fear” and your nagging self-criticism fades away, even starts to sound silly.

4. Write from the body. We feel and remember and experience the world primarily in our bodies. Feelings and memories and how we experience things are related to sensations of the body, to sounds, smells, sensations on the skin, sights, and tastes. When something affects us, whether with joy or confusion or anger or sadness or appreciation or whatever we feel, we feel the impact immediately in our bodies. You might have learned that the body and the spirit or the body and the mind are opposites of each other and you might have learned to trust the mind or trust the spirit and to be wary of the body. It’s through the body that writers make their experiences known to others; it’s through the body that emotions are touched; it’s through the body that we can enter the miraculous world of shared experience.

In order to experience writing from the body, I asked the workshop to determine where they think of themselves being from and to list details of that place that appeal to each of the five senses. The writers then turned these lists into lines of poetry or sentences in paragraphs, repeating the phrase "I'm from" (or I am from).

I wrote an "I'm From" poem over a year ago. It's here. The Georgia Ella Lyon original "I'm From" poem is here.