What is Contemplative Writing, Again?

Recently I had an experience in an online class where I found myself going off in a way different direction, while writing, than I expected. Actually, I didn't know what to expect, and I ran into a trigger - a memory which carries trauma associated with it. I made the decision to *not* write about that, and came up with this piece. The prompt was "What are birds saying?"

It helped *me* clarify some things about how contemplative writing relates to formal contemplative practices. So here, for your exploration, is the piece as I wrote it, with very little alteration.

What are the birds saying when? Immediately my mind scatters in many directions. I could write part of this memoir or that project. I could use this time to write about writing. But can I just be here, in my weekly air conditioned second floor home office, with a huge fan blowing semi-cool air around the room?             

There are no birds in here.            

Oh. Fuck.             

Sensitivity to Sensitivity

This week, the prompt for my weekly contemplative writing classes started "I first knew I was different when..." or "I first knew he was different when..."

The quote at the bottom of the prompt:

“But even though we may not have been fully conscious of the racism of our games, we did understand that racial stereotyping was titillating and a little bit taboo. And as a half, my understanding went deeper.” -Ruth Ozeki, The Face: A Time Code

I had considered making race the prompt - "I first became aware of race when..." and then, decided to broaden it, while still keeping it specific. Race definitely came up - currently, all of my students are caucasian, white people who can, if they choose to, ignore race. As I know working more and more with us white folks on race, though, just because someone is white doesn't mean they ignore race. So for those who wrote about race, it was powerful enough to make me want to do an entire day retreat on race. What a significant and important topic for especially white people to write spontaneously about and share - mainly with each other. If people of color choose to, they can witness it and share, too - but we can be mighty messy as we figure things out out loud.

However, because of the broadened but still specific prompt, two things came up in the majority of writings, things I hadn't expected but am not surprised by.

Mom

My mother, in her twenties in Northern Ireland

Today would be my mother's birthday.
I know the first question you want to ask me: how old would she be?
I am not 100% sure. This is because I cannot seem to remember her birth year, no matter how hard I try. Because I am in touch with some of her childhood friends, born the same year, I have some confidence in saying she would be 73. But I could stand corrected, certainly.

Recently I have begun writing a different kind of memoir. I know, I know, don't start writing another book, Miriam! But this one is coming out naturally, not taking energy from other projects. It's a different kind of writing, more standing outside and looking in rather than telling what happened from a scene-based experience. I am sure a lot of it comes from reading Abigail Thomas' latest memoir, What Comes Next and How to Like It. Anyway, as I usually share a post about my mom on these days, here's a tiny piece from my zygote memoir project, which I am calling (for now) Your Face Before Your Parents Were Born (after the old Zen koan). It's rough draft.

Enjoy.
 

Carrots

I have many stories I tell about my mother, and even more I tell about the two of us. In particular, I have single stories, threads with common themes I have told over particular eras of my life.

Charles Blow

I have already shared some about Charles Blow's memoir Fire Shut up in My Bones over on my other blog, Memoir Mind (www.memoirmind.blogspot.com).  I wanted to make sure folks caught him here, too.

The memoir is outstanding and also difficult to get through - childhood poverty, racism, molestation. But Blow is an amazing writer. The ways he depicts and discusses the sexual abuse (listen from about 17 minutes on for a few) are lyrical and frank. The ways he talks about sexuality, bisexuality in particular, are hilarious and mind-reversing. 

This is a link to a great talk*/interview about the book, even if you don't/haven't read the book. This man is wonderful at taking what is inside and giving it space.

http://chicagohumanities.org/events/2014/journeys/charles-blow-behind-the-column

*A footnote that the first fifteen minutes or so are pretty awkward. The interviewer and Blow have awkwardly differing opinions on social programs and segregation. Don't let that dissuade you from listening on.

Counter-Narratives of Joy

It's easy to tell a sad story.


I know, because I have told one a long time. Many sad stories, in fact. I am not saying it is easy to live a sad story, but modern American culture seems to long for tragedies.

I know this is hedgey ground. I, myself, highly dislike overtly positive psychology, affirmations, attraction theories. I think, I believe, it is highly important to not only address our pain, but to tell that story, again and again and again. Until we feel heard, until it is clear, until we understand.

And yet.

At a short writing workshop in Toronto on Monday of last week, a student ended her last piece, the last one read, with a passage about "counter-narratives of joy." This struck everyone immediately - we all felt the power of it, though it took some discussion afterwards to figure out why, and what the different meanings were.

The main gist was this: we tell stories of woe, of suffering, of sadness, and they are essential.
And yet.
Sometimes they become the main narrative. The only story. The way we show how hard we have worked, how much we have been through. Suffering can seem a credential, being a victim a preferred position, always being wronged as being on the right side. So it's not just a need for stories of joy - stories that also express - also, not instead of - where we have reveled, appreciated and celebrated. Not just that need, but that following, developing, expressing that can actually seem antithetical, opposing, against the stream.

Groundless Inspiration.

Confession time:


When I have not written in this blog for awhile, like recently, it's not because of block.
Or not the kind of writer's block one would normally think of: a lack, a drying up, an inability.
Instead, I have been too inspired.

Too inspired. Tired from being inspired. Not opening books that I know will spark off my mind. Too many ideas, and I cannot get them all down on page or screen. If I could write each time I get an idea, I would be writing all the time. I can't keep it all organized. I know that, especially as I increasingly guide people through the process of book-length memoirs, I should not say this out loud. I should tell you that I have an ideas document, that I use Evernote, that I know how to make all these thoughts manifest into being.

But some days, after teaching, reading, talking so much (so much richness! my god! no complaints!) the last thing I want to do is process more. Chogyam Trungpa says there is no such thing as a moment off, no such thing as vacation. But I need space, and I think - since he taught meditation - this he would understand. Room for the ideas to run around, disappear and reappear in a form that is more digested and bloggable, bookable, speakable.

Last night, on a quiet walk at Olbrich Botanical Gardens, sans camera or notebook with my wife, I cried and said lately, since getting back from a busy, full and wonderful teaching and personal trip to Toronto for eleven days, I have felt utterly overwhelmed. Too much. Too much good work, too much energy, too much to read.

What a "problem" to have! I wake grateful for this "issue" every day, and also, I know that it is one that I will be working with, if I am truly as blessed as it seems, the rest of my (hopefully long) life. Some days all falls into place, organizes itself. The memoir writing is clear, the blogs perk up and fill themselves with my thoughts, the client and student appointments, the classes, sharpen and soften in the right rhythms. Most days.

In fact, the days where this does not occur are the days when I am "off," when I have to structure my own time. I fight between the part of me that wants time "off," truly off, on the beach off, technology off off, and the parts of me that recognize my need for structure: yoga, exercise, writing, cleaning. If I know what is next, I can relax and let go. This is my own personal balance, but I recognize in many of my students how universal it is. Because it is personal for all of us, and intuitive, while we may find systems or ways of understanding it, it changes - and should stay this flexible - from day to day, week to week, month to month.

The groundlessness that accompanies a day off after weeks of work is so so so familiar to me. In particular, I got trained into it working in technical theater, when my only days off were either once a week - Mondays - in which I slept and drank, or weeks on end, waiting for another gig, where I'd get lost and depressed, anxious and come up with projects I would never complete.

Of course, it turns out groundlessness - not knowing what will happen next, the sudden anxiety or panic of open time without a plan - is so universal and human. Some of us have an acquired taste for it and others hate it - and the hatred can come in the form of overplanning for me. But can I love that open time with just the right amount of structure? Each time I hit an open - or relatively open - patch, I have to remind myself that I can. That's what I am doing right now, in fact. And in the process of writing this, a friend writes to see if I want to go see a photography exhibit with her today. I say to myself: why yes. I can. I have my blog posts done for the week, I can schedule some email catch up for later. It's a gorgeous day. Let's do it.

And for just a moment, the groundlessness feels liberating. The secret is: it always is. The inspiration is groundless, always is, and is always liberating.

Remind me next time, ok? I have a hard time remembering, just like every other human being.

Searching For My Father's Voice

My dad in his office, mid 1980's

Daddy? I ask the tape player,
Is that you?
It is Tom Clark. Not Dad.
The jovial
joking commentator on
NPR
WPR
takes me right back
to my mother's bedside
listening to Chapter a Day
falling into nap.

This man is not my father,
nor the next, a guest on Jean Feraca's show.
I look out the window at the crocuses
just now popping up in my late-blooming
yard. Twenty-four years ago
these bloomed in my mother's shade
mid-March, the day Daddy died.
Now it is late April,
two hours south
and I am still searching for his voice.

I put in another cassette. These are
promising - Maxell from the mid-80's
and the shows are ones I know
they listened to together.
I listen to silence, silence, silence
90 minutes of it on each side. 
I am rapt with anticipation,
dread. The last time I heard Dad's voice
I was in my teens and accidentally found
him yelling at the end
of a radio recording.

Here I am hoping I will find his voice.
Hoping I won't.

My Heart on My Sleeve

Love, NYC 2011

This week is a post by a student, Barbara Samuel. She describes so well the process of sharing, what we are looking for from others about our writing, as well as looking for from others about ourselves. I think it really fits my last post about not using writing - or anything else - to get love. She really shows the mixed bag of connection and fear. I am discussing a lot of how this relates to writing memoir in particular over at Memoir Mind, in case this piques your interest in that direction. She also begins to explore how hard it can be to depict a particular time in our lives and share it with others without them seeing us as just that at that time. What do we do when the era we are depicting is so different than who we are now?

We just read Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which she refers to in the piece.

This is a rough draft, as always is the case with my students' pieces here.Actually I prefer to call them "raw drafts" instead of rough drafts - it better depicts why I find them so powerful.

-Miriam

When I visit my son and daughter-in-law I take a flash drive with me that contains
everything I’ve written in the last year and a half. Every time we are together, there
or here, they ask me to read some pieces. That’s one benefit of having a close child;
there is one person in the world who actually wants to hear what I’ve been writing.

Stories of Suffering/Stories of Joy

"Open" Chicago February 2013

A student stated something to me this week that shouldn't have been such a shock. But it was.

This student is writing a memoir. She's been having trouble getting memories out of her mom. Her mom is older, worn out, has had a stroke, and doesn't want to talk about the past. She has threatened to disown my student, in fact, for asking questions about deaths in the family, secrets, potentially shameful or painful things that my student wants so much to understand and get clear in writing her memoir. The process has been heart-breaking.

"All of a sudden I realized the other night that I never ask her about happy memories," my student told me. Wow. Why is that such a shock? It is. "And so I asked her about some happy memories from my childhood. I couldn't get her to STOP talking."

In an interview with a friend of her mom's, my student had heard that her mom was a good mom. A happy mom who really loved her kids. My student was touched by that, really affected and this information likely lead to her asking for more details about good times. Times my student didn't remember, but as soon as her mom began depicting, she recalled clearly.

Memories that were otherwise lost, that didn't fit into her story of suffering.

It is true that we recall suffering more than happiness, that even being present seems easier when we are in pain that in pleasure, or, as is most often the case for a large number of people, when nothing at all is happening. Whenever I do a body prompt - usually a couple of times of year - and ask people to see what their body is saying to them, almost always pain grabs the day.

Somehow there is so much shame around happiness, fear of bragging around it, that we often don't discuss it. The danger is, of course, if we decide that we know who we are (a victim, or someone who has overcome great adversity, or someone who has genuinely suffered - pick your potential poison) then we dismiss everything else that doesn't fit into that story.

The danger of a single story is just as risky in our own personal interactions with ourselves as it is on a socio-cultural level. In other words, it scales down. Though this isn't an "attitude of gratitude" love-and-light call for what you enjoy, remember in good light, it is an important, again, surprisingly, challenge for all writers and humans to take into account. Remember that before you write a single word, you have already told yourself many stories. Maybe this is why fiction sometimes seems closer to the truth than non-fiction - the truth is most of our lives are fiction. So tune in and make sure to get all the details you can, not just those that fit who you think you already are.

If you end an essay, a book, a paragraph even, thinking "Yes, this confirms who I think I am," then you should question that. Hell, not even about writing: if you end a DAY thinking "Yes, that day confirms who I am for me 100%," that should be a signal of danger - danger of solidifying, forgetting, not really paying attention.

Life is full of contradiction, paradox and mixed messages: suffering and joy alongside one another. 
Let all of it in.

PS A lovely post on elephant journal this week related to working with this.

Privacy Versus Secrecy

Milwaukee, WI January 2012

I write memoir. It’s kind of my thing, has been for a few years now. I am a pretty public person, willing to talk with most folks about private issues, though I am discrete, or like to think of myself that way – trying not to over share, to have boundaries. Sometimes my wife has to remind me to speak quietly in a public place while having an intimate conversation on my cell phone.

I am very careful about confidentiality with my students, and set limits as to what gets shared about my own life with others, asking for confidentiality for myself. But now that some essays are getting published – on elephant journal, in the anthology Trans-Kin, I am beginning to realize what I have set up for myself here – a life of a writer sharing her life with everyone who will read it.

Christmas and Closeness

"Do Nothing" - a shot from the recent blizzard in Madison, WI

Please be gentle with yourselves as (if) you continue with the highest holiday season in the States:

In close quarters, we over think, second-guessing our own innate assumption of common humanness, which, I now think, boils down to a common need for kindness. We are cruelest to those who remind us of our capacity for cruelness...it (is) clear that they (don't) like who they become around us...not the hatred of the Other, but the self-hatred produced by the Other.
~G Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

In this passage, G Willow Wilson is referring to her conversion to Islam, her time in a tight-knit neighborhood full of suspicion in Cairo, and to the "clash of Civilizations." In all respect for the larger picture, I wanted to present this as also an inner battle - an inner clash. Long ago, a friend told me that returning home from her college stint at Sarah Lawrence College in upper NY State to her small town Neenah, Wisconsin upbringing made her feel schizophrenic - totally split, paranoid, divided against herself and her family and all she knew and knows.

Holidays - whether they are Christmas observed or not observed, simply time off, with family or not - are rough. Even if you really observe Haunakah or Ramadan, and eat out Chinese with friends on Christmas proper, the overall ethic of American society is one oriented towards this, the "biggest" of all holidays in the year. Co-workers ask if you are "going home for the holidays" even if you are 50. We use the euphemism "holidays" in order to ostensibly be inclusive, but let's face it: we all know that we really mean now - Christmas.

It is a time when it is easy to "disassociate in order to try and connect to others who are dissociated" as a friend recently put it. Families each have their own culture and identities, and when people grow up and split off into different areas of the States or the world, or different states of mind, going "back" can be confusing and even crazy-making (and I don't use that, or the word schizophrenic, lightly here).

Within everyone's families someone is always the scapegoat, the black sheep. Maybe you are that person, maybe you aren't. Be careful of aggression. Give space where you can and consider your own "inner other" - the parts of yourself, perhaps the ones most associated with your family - that you have divided off and attempted to hide from yourself. Your self-hatred will try to roost inside someone else, or your idea of someone else - watch out for that.

Above all, when you find you have resorted to gossip, aggression, fighting or shutting down, be gentle for the fact that you have done that. Our most intimate "clash of civilizations" happens each and every day in our transitions from work to home, family of origin to family of generation or chosen family. Even if your family is pretty peaceful, there's always going to be an edge of re-integrating when people spend time apart. Especially because of the school shooting, there's an edge of tenderness when the edges of people come together. Notice it and be as gentle as you can there.

Connect where you can and stay connected to yourself. I bid you good luck and as much heartbreaking connection as you can bear.

Shame and Outcastery

Hidden Body Message from Austin TX

I have been reading The Chelsea Whistle by Michelle Tea the last few days. I've owned this book for years, and I remember well when it came out in 2002, as I was working at Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative* and Tea's face, via her dyke novel Valencia, was all over the place. I already loved Seal Press even then. I likely recommended The Chelsea Whistle to a few folks without having read it, as I often did back then, because, well, booksellers almost never have the time to read that, ironically, they would like.

The way I have been reading it the last few days of course relates to my last blog post about memoirs.  Tea writes in a dense, terse style, with some images and a lot of feeling. Her editor did a fantastic job, as I noted in quick in the blog post can make a huge difference. She clearly feels little   shame - now, at least - and mostly wrote the book in a state of reckoning, of discovery but not the first time discovery that happens with confession. Well-wrought without being over-processed, Chelsea Whistle (which refers to a special whistle the rough boys of her hood would use to call one another when in trouble, but she would never use because those boys *were* her trouble) is a powerful read.

I have a lot more to say about her style, about what it says about her processing, etc, but the main thing I wanted to say today ties to her speaking of being an outcast. I have been sick the last few days - thus all the time to read - and underneath illness, always for me, is shame. Deep deep shame. A sense that I am not good enough. It takes on different story lines, depending on my state of mind and what is going on/not going on because I am sick: I am weak, I am not working enough, I am going to get fired/let go, People are going to wonder if I am faking it, etc.

This stuff goes WAY back - quite a bit of it appears in my *own* memoir about childhood, My Bermuda Triangle (yet to be published). Here's a section on illness:

            Finally a doctor told me (upon my fifth visit to him that season for chronic sinusitis and bronchitis): “You’d be better off at school. You are not suffering from something with germs,” he warned, and then pointed out that my home was a smoky tomb for my lungs. “You won’t get better until you get out of the house. You can tell your mother that, if you want to. Or I can talk to her.”

            I didn’t tell her. I wanted to stay home. Where my father was lingering in what would be the last year of his life. If I was home, I could hear his footsteps a room over, or him throwing up the chemicals that were supposed to kill his bad cells. No one wanted me there – one of my brothers was already hard to get up in the mornings, and they worried about my health, which was too much to bear with my father’s on the line. My mother would later say that, though awful, these were the best years of their marriage, because they had so much time together.

I thought of him as my hero. The way he kept distance from me only fired me up to ask for more contact, the kind of buying-me-stuffed-animals, poking-around-used-bookstores kind of attention he had given me when everything was better – when I was younger and he was healthier. For once he was potentially available, all the time.

            Mrs. Schmidt only added to the desire to disassociate from school. She was my teacher that year.  All three of us kids had had her, and she hated my eldest brother, David, and me, only preferring Alex, the middle brother, who was athletic. Our black sheep in the family, Alex, was “normal” – he did sports and was social; the rest of us: Mom, Dad, David and Miriam, were bookish and shy and out of shape.

   “You know what Mrs. Schmidt said about you yesterday?” Anne, one of my loyal friends, said, walking home with me one day. “She told the whole class you’ve missed more than half of sixth grade so far.” We walked slowly, stepping on the fall leaves; my lungs clear for the first time in months. I liked Anne, though she also made me uncomfortable. Her family, too, was dirty and weird like mine, their house full of strange silences, beer posters, and animal poop neglected in dark corners. Like mine, her room was cluttered and private.

            “Really?” I tried not to sound surprised. I knew I’d missed a lot. But that much?

            “Yep. And she said if you miss much more, they’ll have to keep you back.”           

“She told the whole class that?”

            “Yep.” I didn’t expect Anne to stand up for me. Her being half-American Indian, half-Caucasian made her very vulnerable to a dictator like Mrs. Schmidt. No one stood up to Mrs. Schmidt except the boys who played sports. And she bent over backwards for them.

            One day I relayed this story to my mom, casually, expecting her to rail on me –

See! Even Your Teacher Cares You’ve Been Out So Much! But she took another tack.

            “I can’t believe that bitch.” It was rare for a swearword to cross her lips. “How dare she. That’s not right, to share that with everyone.”

            I know my mother also said something to the principal, amazingly. When I returned to school the next day, Mrs. Schmidt glared at me in a new way. Of course, this only compounded the kids’ teasing. “Half-gone Miriam,” went one taunt. They knew it before anyone did. I was half-gone. I was trying to stay home, as bad as it was for me, partially because I was separating myself from them.

            I remember my mother slapping me on my left cheek – just the once – because I claimed I was too sick to go to school, though I had been absent for weeks, with no apparent symptoms. My father was the one with symptoms. Now that he was home all the time, mom and I both wanted him. He and my mother and I were depressed, locked in a triangle with sunken corners and sides. Fighting each other for his attention only pulled my father down. Decades later, I’d live out the same configuration, again and again – me and my desire to protect what I felt was mine; the “opposing corner” of my mother or sister-in-law or another girlfriend justifiably staking some claim; the male figure by himself, crying or hiding from us in shame. So many levels of sickness.

The main way that I continue to perpetuate being "outcast" - and playing victim - is in illness. I get isolated when sick, literally, from others and from my own body, and then I start making very strange ideas up about who I am or am not, what I am capable of, if I will even recover (yes, even from a small cold!). All of these things make a lot more sense when put into the context that my missing school in fifth and sixth grades was, in fact, half faking it and half real.

How does this relate to Chelsea Whistle? She almost never mentions being sick in her book.
On a really deep level, below story, Tea talks a lot, more and more at the end of the book, about how she didn't want to leave this place that haunted her so much - Chelsea, her home, her actual house - her creepy stepfather, her sister - all of it, all the humiliation and shame. She does leave, eventually - if you look at her map of where she was born versus where she lives now on Facebook, SF is about as far from Chelsea as one can get and still be living in the same country. But clearly, in her writing, to me, she also has not distanced herself - not anymore than the remove necessary to have a clear perspective. She doesn't dissociate. She stays real, in the fluid, unstructured mind of struggle and memory.

Today, as I posted on Facebook that I was struggling with shame and sickness, many people posted supportive comments: "It'd be a shame if you didn't take off time to take care of yourself," and "I realize I have a lot of guilt about missing work, thanks for bringing this up." It helps, again, to write and realize that others have this, too. It is not "just me" - none of this is "just me," while, of course, my own unique story is "just mine." Thanks, Michelle Tea, for a reminder of that, and all memoir writers, as much as I critique your finished product: it is brave and heart-rending to read all that is so incredibly personal and find that it cannot help but reveal things that are so totally universal at the same time.



*PS You can still get a lot of Tea's work at Rainbow! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

Confession versus Expression

Austin, TX

This is an unusually long blog post - I am letting you know because it's been a long time coming, and is in fact a draft of an essay for my book on writing in-progress called Sleight of Hand. I promise it is worth it, but it's longer than you are used to here at Inside Space.

I write memoir. It's the main genre I write, though some essays are more "essay-like" and some are more "memoir-like," depending on how you define the genres. Definitely I fall into the category of "creative non-fiction."

In my experience (reading and writing), what makes non-fiction creative is not the number of adjectives or the less-narrative-more-lyrical-structure. These are common definitions that I myself use in clarifying the distinctions of this new-ish-ly celebrated genre, which rarely finds shelf space of its own.  What really makes it "creative" is that the truth is being communicated in a less conventional manner. Instead of reporting the facts, confessing the crimes, objectively investigating the connections, creative non-fiction (especially of the memoir ilk) explores the truth through poetic form.

Never-Ceasing

(photo from a strip mall in Dallas)

It never ceases to amaze me.
Week after week, after month, after year - seven of them now, from when I started part part time to full time and then some.

I write these prompts, and the students respond. And inevitably, most of the students will say:
"I can't believe you knew I needed to write about this."
or
"I wasn't even thinking about this, where did it come from?"
or
"Why are you making me write about this?"

The thing is, the prompts are vague/open enough that they can be interpreted lots of different ways. One student last week was sure I was demanding that she/they write about writing their own memoirs - it's the part of the prompt she could not ignore, that would not go away from her. Ditto for others that they had to talk about parts of their lives that haven't happened yet, or their favorite childhood book, or what they are reading - or not reading - right now.

Our inner impetuses, impulses, are so powerful, they take on the face of the current circumstance and recommend or reinforce what we need to hear or don't want to hear or both.
Or neither - what we don't need and don't want but won't go away.

Here is the prompt from this last week, with a follow-up list with questions that came out of students' answers. These ideas are a whole other 5 or 6 prompts in themselves.

Enjoy. See what arises for you. See if you can "blame" it on me. I'll take the blame, no problem.
So long as I get to read the results.

Miriam

----------------------------------------------------------
The original prompt

Writing and Reading

Imagine a book in front of you.

Flip through the pages, hear the sound of paper, and notice if it has a scent.

Look at the front cover, Index, Table of Contents, spine.

What is the title?

Is this book fictional or non-fictional?

A kid’s book or an adult book?

Maybe it doesn’t exist yet – it’s the book you are writing or have always wanted to read.

Perhaps you read it when you were young and no longer recall the title –

but you can remember how your heart felt when you finished it.

Take yourself to the place(s) that reading takes you, and write from there.

If you don’t enjoy reading, go into that resistance.

Feel yourself come full circle as you write, using words, to describe reading words.

I’ll let you know when your twenty minutes are up.

-Miriam Hall

If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, you must write it. ~Toni Morrison

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it. ~Oscar Wilde

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. ~Jessamyn West

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
~Benjamin Franklin

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

The questions that arose out of student answers - either they gave me these questions or I derived them from their answers...

Were you read to as a child?

Were there books in your home?

Could you buy any book you wanted?

Were you dis/encouraged to read?

Were you ashamed to read?

Were books your only friends?

Did you leave books behind for boys?

Did High School, College, family life kill your love of the written and read word?

Are you still close to books?

Do you know/can you imagine what the "book of you" would look like? Written in code, plain English or Spanish, Russian?

Are you an open or closed book?

What is covered or uncovered in you?

Where does your mind go when its pages are let loose?

Does reading amazing books please you or make you angry or jealous that someone else wrote it first?

If you are writing a book, do you know what the cover would/will be?

Is a Kindle, Nook, or digital reader the same as a book?

Do you read to read?

Do you want to be read?

Do you write to have something to read or to share?

Or are reading/writing separate for you - one an affair that discounts the other?

Or in an entirely different family altogether?

Escaping In

I've been reading this last week like it is going out of style. Natalie says to us, when we are meditating, "Meditate like this is your last minute on earth," during the last minute of the meditation session. Katagiri used to say it to them, now she says it to us.

I've been reading like each book is the last book I will ever read - On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett. Good books, no doubt, excellent books, in fact. Not bad ones to be the "last" books I ever read, heaven forbid. But I haven't been reading them like that, voraciously, only because they are good. This morning, waking, wanting to rip through another, I had to admit to myself that I am also reading out of escape.

I'll never forget reading in some Adult Children of Alcoholics or Adult Survivors of Abuse book that "these children" (meaning I am one of them) tend to read to escape. In the last year I have learned more than I did in college about reading to learn - about structure, style, to really appreciate where the author was coming from and, as Natalie says, "To get inside his/her mind." This has lead to a very different kind of reading, more attentive, less escapist. I've also read more memoir in the last year than ever before, and those can feel harder to "escape" in some ways, for me, at least.

I am clearly escaping into others stories, and I am not here to say this is bad. Last week in Taos was tough - I told some of my students that I hemorraged writing (one newer student worried that I was talking about it so "negatively" but I don't see it that way) - scenes from my sexual life from ages 12-28 poured out of me at all times of the day and night. Just writing this now, I realize it makes sense that I might want a break, and I am not so sure that "escaping" breaks into books right now is a bad thing. Living Lucy Grealy's face through Ann Patchett, following, like a detective, the beach honeymoon of McEwan's doomed newlyweds, these are not escapes into their problems (versus mine) but deep divinings into how these authors, whether in the form of memoir or fiction, depict these difficulties and joys.

So there, writing about it, I remember that we can escape into things, not just out of things. I am still in my life, still thinking about all that arose last week. I am done writing about it for now, have written many other things this week. All this reading is not a "problem," I see, if it ever was for me. I am just as present, just as joyful, just as compassionate, for the fictional or memoir rendered people, and still present for the real persons in my life. I'm doing alright.

Thanks for letting me check in on your web time, world.