Northwest Inland Writing Project Summer Writing Retreat: Interlude

I have done a little bit of reading about what I can do to encourage readers to come to my blog.

Surely one of the cardinal rules is to post once a day so that a reader doesn't have to go beyond the post at the top of the blog to read my most recent pieces.

To hell with that. If you are reading this Interlude, and if you are wondering what I've been up to, just go here to read about what I presented at Day 1 of the writing retreat and go here for Day 2.

Okay. Now. I have a few things I'd like to write and reflect upon regarding my role and preparation as the Inland Northwest Writing Project's Summer Writing Retreat's Visiting Writer.

First of all, in the field of writing, I'm not a big shot. I haven't published a book; I have published a couple of essays and a few poems. I told at least one person at the retreat that when I got hired to lead workshops, the Inland Northwest Writing Project hired a little shot.

I'm definitely a little shot.

I don't think I bring anything special to my role as Visiting Writer because I'm a little shot. I'm happy, however, that the Inland Northwest Writing Project was willing to take a chance on hiring a little shot.

As a community college instructor, I work with little shots. While some of us have presented at national conferences and a few have been published by national publications and one will be publishing an enormously compelling memoir, overall we spend the majority of our time focused on teaching, not building a scholarly resume.

Over the years, I have developed an unusual way of developing pedagogy.

I don't read and haven't (much) read books about teaching writing. I don't read books about teaching strategies. I don't assign my students books explaining how to write. Many excellent poets and fiction writers and memoir writers have written what I hear are wonderful books on writing in these genres. I just haven't read them. Or even looked at them.

When I came to work as a Visiting Writer, a small, but strong voice inside me says I'm a fraud because I haven't read Writing Down the Bones or any of Anne Lamont's books or Julia Cameron's and I've never taken a creative writing course and my reputation as a writer is pretty much limited to those, whom I deeply appreciate, who read my blog.

Oh! And those who have heard me preach. I think some of my best writing happened in the handful of sermons I've given at St. Mary's Episcopal Church.

What I'm getting at here is that much of what I've learned about writing came from sources that weren't dealing with writing at all.

For example, a book that has shaped much of my thinking about writing and has helped me understand my mindset as a writer is Thich Nhat Hanh's Being Peace. His insight into connectedness, non-duality,being awake, and consciousness shapes how I teach writing and how I've tried to discipline my mind as an observer and agent in my life and has greatly expanded my imagination.

Likewise, Robert Grudin's book On Dialogue is not a writing handbook. Grudin's book explores the power of dialogic thought and the copious ways the mind can work in its pursuit of truth. His book encourages us to give our minds over to expansion, to seeing things as many ways as possible, to give ourselves over to the copious ways the mind works and to delight in the fertility of ideas, not to narrow them or reduce them.

As I write, I try to give myself over to the delights of copia. In my writing instruction, I encourage my students toward the freedoms implicit in thinking dialogically, of writing copiously.

Furthermore, when I read poems or stories or memoirs or philosophy or religion or the Bible or any other piece of writing, I always ask this question: what is this piece of writing telling or showing me about the act of writing itself?

For example, when Jesus instructs his disciples to be as wise as serpents and gentle as doves, that's a solid bit of writing instruction, especially when I listen to Martin Luther King, Jr. who said that in these words Jesus was instructing his followers to be tough-minded and tender-hearted.

Again, solid writing instruction.

In the poem, "Her Right Eye Catches the Lavender", found here, the speaker of the poem describes Judy Rock's way of being with the gulls:

Knowing her as I do

I know she chose one of them and pursued him

relentlessly—her eye is part of her mind –

and though there would be patter she never would lose him

until he was gone.

Here's what writing demands of us: to zero in, pursue, to do it relentlessly, to unite the eye (and the senses) with the mind, and to commit oneself not to lose the subject of the mind's and sense's focus until it is "gone".

A good lot is going on in Stern's poem. A good lot is going on in the ruminations of Robert Grudin. A good lot is going on in the writings of Thicht Nhat Hanh and the teachings of Buddha. A good lot is going on in the teachings of Jesus and the preaching of Martin Luther King. A good lot is going on in the poetry, stories, memoirs, histories, and other genres of writing in the world.

In one way or another, these writings and teachings, at some level, are instructing us in the ways of writing, or at the very least, giving us models for writing.

So far, it's been reading and thinking this way over the years that has informed my ideas about and practice of writing.

As the Inland Northwest Writing Project Summer Writing Retreat's Visiting Writer, I tried to invigorate those who came to the retreat with the inspiration and knowledge I've drawn from such sources.

It's a Buddhist thing: I've learned the most about writing from sources that weren't about writing at all -- at first glance.

Life in the Basement: Assignment # 14

My sisters and I continue giving one another writing assignments. Our latest is about books that had an impact on us.

Silver Valley Girl and InlandEmpireGirl wrote about books that had an impact on them here and here. And, coincidentally, Katrina at Notes on a Napkin, wrote a similarly focused post recently, here.

I don't know when I started going to the basement and reading all the Life and Look magazines we had piled on shelves and on the floor. Mom saved them all and it was quite a library, albeit a not very well organized one.

I must have been in the fourth or fifth grade. I was curious about the word "sexy". I didn't understand the word "sexy", but the magazines featured women who were described this way, in particular Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, and Sophia Loren. I found pictures of these three, often on covers, other times in the magazines, and stared at them, trying to understand why they were described with this word I didn't understand.

Nonetheless, they intrigued me. I knew Marilyn Monroe was dead, but pictures of her continued to appear. I knew that Elizabeth Taylor had been married often and found her eyes very pretty. Sophia Loren was unlike any woman I'd ever seen in person. I thought she was of another world. Such elegance registered to me as almost other worldly.

It was just a year or two earlier than this that Silver Valley Girl had been born, in 1963. I was starting to get some ideas from the playground and around the neighborhood that her conception had occurred by an act that involved my father and mother, but I couldn't accept those rumors.

I was flipped out crazy about my little sister. I thought she was the most beautiful baby on the face of the earth. I loved doting over her, playing with her, making her laugh, and teasing her. I had walked in on my parents at different times when they were dressing. I did not believe that anything as inelegant as their genitals could have had anything to do with my little sister being brought into being. (It was all right if I was created that way, I guess, but not her.)

Life Magazine changed my view. The astounding pictures in the issue whose cover is pictured above, which came out when I was in the fourth grade, gave me authoritative evidence that my mother's pregnancy had, if fact, been the result of fertilization, and that fertilization involved my father putting a seed inside my mother.

I was astonished. I stared and stared at the pictures that Life Magazine published of life before birth. I would look at Silver Valley Girl, all bouncy and funny and learning to talk, and I'd look at my father, asleep on the couch, his white T-shirt too small cover his growing belly; I'd look at my mom, working at the kitchen table, smoking Pall Malls, grading workbooks or making out report cards, and I'd marvel, silently, within myself, at how this passed out man and that overworked cigarette smoking woman had somehow, some time, come together some way in an act of fertilization that created this sister who was that little seedling I'd seen Life's pictures of.

I looked at that issue of Life while it was upstairs and then when it went to the basement, I'd pull it out and marvel more.

But, my marvelling did not end there.

At around the same time Silver Valley Girl was born, so was the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

Life magazine covered marches and camp-ins and demonstrations and lynchings and leaders and all phases of that movement. As a grade schooler, I was entranced by what was happening in the South. The March on Washington. Freedom City. The fire hoses and police dogs. The church bombings. I was secretly familiar with names like Ralph Abernathy, James Meredith, Julian Bond, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Andrew Young.

I educated myself with Life magazine's pictures and captions about poverty and segregation and I could tell by the faces I saw in these pictures that something in the United States was deeply wrong and that these marches and demonstrations were deeply right.

It meant that I was going against the grain of some of the sentiment in Kellogg, Idaho. I'd heard Dr. King called Martin Luther Coon. A few years later, when he was shot, a classmate reported that his law enforcement father had said that it was about time someone shot that nigger son of a bitch. I would come to hear all things black mocked: the words Afro-Americans, African-Americans, Black Panthers, Black Pride, Black is Beautiful and I would hear, and would myself use, racial epithets.

I don't know what was real. I don't know if my father used racial epithets out of sense of genuine hatred or because it was how he dealt with what he didn't know. I used such language, when I did, not out of any commitment to racial prejudice, but because the words were around me and in the air. Sometimes it was a way to get a laugh.

In the long run, it was the reading I did in the basement that stuck. Those pictures shaped me into a person eager to learn more. I read Martin Luther King's speeches and sermons as I grew older. I listened to ideas of theologians and sociologists and others that talked about evil and sin and racism as not merely an individual, but a corporate thing.

I began to realize that I was and always would be a participant in institutions whose practices were larger than my individual principles or deeds. The idea of institutional racism made sense to me as I got older.

It all came back to me when my father died and we had a get together after the funeral in Mom and Dad's backyard. One of Dad's oldest friends, a great friend of the family, and a friend who visited Dad all the time while Dad was dying and who has been a great help to my mother, was talking to me and some others about a basketball player from Kellogg who was leaving the area to play college ball. He said, "Once he starts getting banged around by those niggers down there, he'll be back up here playing ball at NIC."

It was a statement fraught with all kinds of ugliness and bad logic. It was made by a good man, one of the finest men I've known, head of one of the finest families.

When I read in the basement, I was trying to figure things out. How are babies made? Why are these black people oppressed?

As I grew older I asked more questions: Why do people in my town refer to blacks with so many nasty names? Why did I pick up those names? Why, when I tried to argue with my dad about things he said, did he argue back so hard? My dad was a good man. He was intelligent. The men in Kellogg were good men. Almost all of them were intelligent. They weren't ignorant.

And, yet. . . .

Eventually, I figured out what sexy means and my reading in the basement took on added dimensions.

But sex itself has remained a puzzle.

So has the question of race.

The book that affected me the most wasn't a book. It was a magazine: Life Magazine. It started me puzzling about questions I doubt I'll ever solve.

Three Beautiful Things 01/24/07: The Boss, Connections, Slurpy DP

1. At the end of the Research Writing/Literature of the American Working Class course two years ago, I dropped Sam a note and offered him my Bruce Springsteen LP's. I never heard from him and forgot I made the offer. I ran into Sam today outside the Blue Door Theater and he asked me if the offer still held. You bet it does. We'll make the transaction soon.

2. I enjoy the way we are seeing how Martin Luther King, Jr., the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, and the writing and thinking of Robert Grudin and the idea of copia all interrelate in WR 122. I'm hoping my students begin to see that when ideas are profound, there's a way they have deep commonality.

3. I purchased a Diet Pepsi from the machine that sits outside near the theater. The machine is subject to the elements. My Diet Pepsi was slushy and I pretended like I'd bought a slurpy and enjoyed the icy can of soda.

Three Beautiful Things 01/16/07: Popcorn, King, Othello

1. I got too excited about making popcorn tonight and the top of the air popper blew off because of the kernel volume. I had to laugh at myself for my eagerness and promised to be more popcorn moderate next time.

2. The temperature in my 8:30 WR 115 classroom was 57 degrees. It was snowing outside. The campus was on the brink of shutting down, and did at ten o'clock. And, yet, in spite of the distractions of cold, snow, and closure, my students got involved in learning about Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and made excellent contributions to discussion. You won't catch me complaining about "these students today". My students today were wonderful and were wonderful in less than appealing conditions.

3. I watched a rough but moving run through of the last half of Act V of our production of Othello. It was moving. I felt an upsurge of emotion for the power of the acting and of confidence that we are going to have a very good show.