Six Years Later...

An amazing testimonial appeared today in my mailbox from a long-term student, with whom I am now working on - and almost done with - a book! Thank you, Jo Simons...


I was searching for something in my stack of papers and came across my first two writing assignments in your class.  It was SO amazing to read them now with the book done!  OMG Miriam!  You really launched me!!!!!

The prompt was “what’s the secret to good writing?”  Here’s what I wrote.

The secret to good writing is in the pen.  I am celebrating pens of late since we use them so rarely.  I miss handwriting!  You can tell so much about a person by how their handwriting looks.  But technology has robbed us of that — we type notes to each other that do not give a clue as to how we feel or who we really are.  To me, this is a tragic loss — part of the dehumanization of our species. 

What Writing Looks Like

Procrastination.
Evasion.
Deadlines and then reaction.
Writing.
Crying.
Banging head against manuscript again and again.
Breaking through: writing.
Time is up, drop it again.
Come back.
Try to write again.
Crying.
Writing.
Deep joy and relief, thank you thank you thank you gratitude.
Calling on friends to read and for support.
Going for walks.
Writing.
Yoga.
Writing.
Editing.
Writing.
Editing.
Crying some more.

My favorite reasons why people return to writing

Philly, PA September 2013

I often ask students, in the beginning of a seven-week session, why they are coming back (if returning) or why they came in the first place (if new). It tells me a lot and occasionally also gives me great one-liners for promotion for the classes. It's easier and more fun than asking folks for quotes about the classes. Here are a few of my favorites from this time around:

This class lets my life haunt me.

Ambiguity is truth – writing shows me how non-dual things are.

Truth has no edge, and in writing, I find that non-edge.

Humility – really realizing we don’t know – is powerful.

I tell myself in my daily life that I can't waste fucking time writing, and yet, here I do it.

This class inspires me to have curiosity around being a curiosity.

If writing is swimming, then this class is flippers for my writing.

It's a practice around writing that involves other people. 

The ambiguity bit is important and powerful - it reminds me of the wonderful dharma talk by Pema Chodron, linked below. You have to be a Tricyle member to listen to the whole thing, but just reading the intro is strong - and joining Tricycle is a good thing to do!

The Fundamental Ambiguity of Being Human.

Thank You

"Eyes of Love," Paris storefront, June 2013

For my writing students.

 “Writing is constantly letting letters arrange into different combinations and meanings.”

-       a student from this last seven-week session

Thank you

for showing up

for speaking out

for putting up with struggle

for laughing when you can

for giving critic space before giving it the boot

for your sincere joy and curiosity

for witnessing words and their energy

for being game to go as far as you can at any given time

for your commitment to the unknown.

Sometimes total strangers trump intimacy in terms of safety and secrecy.

Sometimes metaphor carries deep feeling miles further than it can by itself.

Sometimes when breath hits the bottom of lungs, of diaphragm, something cracks and opens knowing that is otherwise unspoken

there in those spaces we pull out

the shovels

the maps

the compasses

and we curiosity our way through our minds’ landscapes

our hearts’ fire escapes

our instincts’ innate flow

our potential fates’ uneven knowing

Sometimes in the middle of the most ordinary-seeming statements, something clicks into place that’s been edging in that direction, letter by letter, syllable by syllable, for decades.

It’s in those moments

and the gaps in-between

that we practice

this writing.

Sacred and mundane

deep and cheap

real and fantastical

understood and undermined

woven and separate.

New Year's Intention

A few years ago, friends of ours introduced us to, or co-invented with us (none of us can seem to recall which happened) a practice of coming up with a single word for the upcoming year, on New Year's Eve. The word, we decided, should have many possible meanings, and not be stated as any kind of affirmation (I will play more in the coming year/I am playing more in the coming year) or resolution (I need to play more in the upcoming year). Instead, it would allow for word play - for exploration, for change in meaning, throughout the year.

The first one Dylan and I chose, and we chose the same, was "consume." We tried to gently explore our food consumption (going on a diet, eventually, but really focusing more on watching/noticing consumption than losing weight, which was a helpful change in perspective), and also financial consumption, consumption of goods, of energy, of social interactions.

Luckily, neither of us developed consumption.

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.

Ab/Normal

Hidden Message, Austin TX

A few weeks ago, in one of my writing classes, the word "Normal" kept coming up.
We laughed about it a bit - what *is* normal after all? - but it kept creeping into the conversation.

Clearly, although quite a few of us - myself included - have done a lot of hard work around appreciating our authentic selves, not worrying too much about what *normal* is, it's still an area of discomfort. So when I got to one of the last chapters in Brene Brown's book I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn't) and found a section entitled "Shame and Normalcy" I almost burst.

Silence

A single leaf in the lake along La Ferme de Villefavard, Limousin, France.

Whenever I go on retreat, like I am now, before I leave, I get endless questions about what is it like to be in silence for an extended period of time with others. It's ironic to answer with words, since the experience of silence is so wordless itself. And yet, it's a legitimate question. So I'll try to say something about my experiences with it.

Inner Critic V. Inner Child

NYC child mannequins

Time for a show down.

Well, not exactly. More like a slow down.

Now that I am slowing down, on vacation, the fits my inner child has been throwing lately have calmed down. It's easy to negotiate my desires and my obligations with so much space.

Yet, when I am in a busy social situation, even here, in a lovely house with one of my best friends' roommates, or in a shop with too much stimulation, I feel the contrast coming on.
The Inner Critic says:
"Tough it out. It'll only be five minutes more. Be polite and nice."
The Inner Child is saying, or thinking:
"I want out now. This is not what I want or need. Take care of me."

Topics from my Marquette University students

Each week I cull new writing topics from the writing that they share aloud.

We also make a bunch up ourselves, freely. They have endless options, in other words.
I wanted to share their wisdom and inquiries with a larger audience. So here you go! Just try a few of these on for size next time you write...

2000 miles from my front door
When I freak out...
Swore we would never speak of it
From my dad's insane need to...
My favorite things I own
Unfortunate parallel parking
My ridiculous inability to...
Plenty of science
Some people show intelligence in other ways
Don't forget...
Why we put ourselves through stress and pressure
Does society know what's best for...
I saw it before plenty of times, but...
Knees weak
When I feel/felt most alive...
Noise and silence
Maybe we're/I'm not good enough
The billions of other people who have stood in this very spot
When God somehow seems realer than ever
Taking a job/life way too seriously
Being our/yourself all the time
The only things to take seriously are death, true love and illness (or find your own three)
Social acceptability
I hate...
When I live by the walls society puts up...
Maybe I talk too much
100 shades of red
I'm a hungry sophomore in college
Something I wrote in Elementary school or day care
I'm not an asshole, I'm just...
What I don't like is...
It's nobody's fault
I didn't mean to get...
My God
Obey obey obey
Artsy stuff
How does art fit in to life/career/family?
Not certain enough
The words employers/parents/teachers love to hear

Questions I Can Answer

Sometimes, having a spouse who is going through a gender transition (male to female) is a lot.
Sometimes, teaching people how to be there for themselves, how to be aware and in the moment, and how to practice art that takes them there, is a lot.
Sometimes running my own business(es) and traveling for work is a lot.

This is not a surprise, of course, that I get overwhelmed.
But when all of these a lots and more come to fruition at once, I turn to ... Crossword puzzles.

That's right. You thought I was going to say meditation, didn't you? Or yoga. Or walking, or writing, or drawing or reading dharma or eating good food or getting plenty of sleep. Or talking to friends.

Yes. Those are all helpful, essential. They are my "first lines of defense" or even better, of "non-defense."

But sometimes the empowerment I need is to be able to cleverly answer questions, especially when they are puns. To have AHA moments that I can actually access when everything appears to be (and when it needs to remain) made of mysteries my intellect cannot and should not discern.

That's when Crossword Puzzles are the answer.

a few sounds take me there

a poem came to me while doing yoga this morning...

a few sounds take me there

chickadee dee dee turns into

the twits of

bats on a cool fall evening -

the impermanence

of sonar.

i cannot sleep

up like the cicadas

long after midnight

long into when the day

has finally cooled

off enough to rest

so i rest.

all my tiny children inside

curled up under the creaking tree

of me now

adult

awake into the wee

hours.

i only know i have slept

because at some point i wake

and think:

those were only dreams, sweetie,

nightmares.

that place never existed -

where he touched me -

that time is outside time.

but then i realize before i went to sleep

i was awake

very awake

and knew full well

what was happening--

the crickets

my witnesses.

Reflections at Pewitt's Nest 

Underneath the grave skies flashing occasional white space
My face fills up my own reflection

Mirror Mirror on the river
Who is the most alive of us all?

When someone dies, they take the present moment with them
A chunk of it lost forever, uncontinued
Without perception
One less person to help keep this clumsily constructed world
Rolling forward

My memories are buried alive
As are everyone else's - gravestones flagging
The fields of living just beyond our daily walls

They add to the past - a collection now so vast
That cemeteries have overcome cities

Death has certainly overcome me
From memory to memory creeping closer as I age
More in the cache, more fading away
Fewer years ahead, the present more potent
Poignant seconds


I line up my camera, frame the shot:
An acorn cap, a yellowed leaf, a rotted log
Everything in its place, liquid, lucid, beautiful
As I snap, the dead frog
I did not think I saw
Reveals itself to me
A moment of not memory
A moment of pure existence
Witnessing the split second dissolution
Of every other thought

Grammar Exposures

How we write is often far more telling than what we write.


I am, of course, speaking mostly of rough drafts. While it is true - and in fact, Natalie Goldberg encourages us to look closely at the structure of each book, article, essay and story we read, noticing the organization of the writer's mind - that a finished product does show us something about the person who wrote it, there's nothing like a rough draft (hint: often emails are rough drafts) to show us what is really going on, if we know what to look for.


In Listening In, I note that we can listen/read for shifts such as:
-Change in tense (piece was in past tense, now is in present tense)
-Change in Point of View (you told the piece in second person, now he is telling it in third person)
-Change in tone of voice/in voice (at first it is very instructional, then suddenly I am confessing things)
-Change in form (from poetry to prose, from journal to essay, etc)
-Sudden resistance (this sucks, I don't know why I am writing this, I am bored)

All The Ways We Apologize

“I’m sorry.” My mother warned me when I was little to never say this more than was necessary. “If you say it when you don’t really mean it, you won’t mean it when you really do.” In particular, she was vigilant about warding off apologies for non-apology situations – saying “I’m sorry” when you bump into someone in the store (“Say Excuse Me,” she corrected), saying “I’m sorry” when you are actually being sarcastic (put a peri-menopausal mother and a lone teen daughter together in a house and you get that one a lot) and “I’m sorry” when you are trying to be sympathetic (“I’m sorry is for when you are taking responsibility,” she would intone, “not empathizing”).

Talking to Myself

It's hot. Humid. Gross.
Weather that belongs to July, appearing in June.
I grew up in this state, but I get worse with it every year, and every year it gets worse.

Combine that with depression, and me=mess.

After a blow of financial news about things we have to do with the house and things we want to do, I found myself, yep, frozen this afternoon: cranky, overwhelmed, unable to function. This morning I read and tweeted about a useful kind of broken; this kind isn't. Lock down.

Actions Actually DO Speak Louder Than Words

...which feels ironic to write in words...

I'm not dumb. I know there's an inherent conflict in even writing about how I have experienced, more and more, that statement to be true, that age-old adage:

Actions Speak Louder Than Words.

I just can't get over how true it is, perhaps because I listen to, write, and share so many words every day, all the time. Reading books, articles, blogs; writing manuscripts, poems, essays, emails; listening to raw writings, soulful conversations and even the radio. I often say my classes are so that we know that not everything arises in finished form - that a good, solid start from the heart is necessary for clear writing, but of course when all we read is finished product, we think all the fineries - great editing, structural reconsiderations, etc, should come, too, in the first draft. I say a lot of smart and insightful things, and I even believe some of them, truly, deeply. Words are awfully sexy and wise.

Be Careful What You Wish For

In the Summer 2011 issue of Writers Ask, a quarterly publication of Glimmer Train Stories, Armand ML Inezian notes “Oh sure, there are writers who sound very humble, but you have to have some kind of ego to get through all the rejections.” This is at the end of an interview in which he states there are two kinds of successful writers – the people who “win the lottery” and those who stick with it diligently over time, “like a glacier, slowly scouring the earth, and moving ever toward the horizon.”

Having a spouse who is transgender is great practice in this regard. This morning, she said to me “I realize that at some point I will have no control (due to hormones) over how I present myself, gender-wise. I often feel like everything is moving so slowly, way slower than I want, then, I realize, it is all beyond my control. It’s a little like that saying ‘Be careful what you wish for…’ – I want to be a woman, but secretly I am a little scared of it, or want to have more control over the process. Not quicker or just the way I want it at each moment, which is impossible.”

Our relationship to change and to fame, even to downfalls – to life overall - is very, very similar. Of course, at base, everyone wants to be recognized, observed, appreciated for who we actually are. But there’s a lot of mixed information covering that ideal – sometimes we don’t know who we are, or don’t like who we think we are. Sometimes we self-sabotage, which is both under our control and not under our control, and sometimes, as hard as we try, the world seems not to respond.

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

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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?

Chicken/Egg

I often wonder what comes first: the chicken or the egg. How did I land in this beautiful house, with this amazing partner and stunningly meaningful work for which I get paid a living wage? There has been a lot of pain, a lot of confusion, and also a lot of wonder and amazing conclusions.

I often cannot tell which action in my life resulted in where I am or a particular effect. I have been reading a lot about Karma lately in preparation for Seminary and the one thing I am finally getting is that it warns us that things are never as simple as A leading to B, or even A and B leading to C. Causes have supporting causes, conditions, circumstances. Everything is interacting with everything else. So to say "I went to this meditation class and the rest is history" is both a fallacy and has accuracy.

Two things I know for sure, though, that have equally affected me are writing and Buddhism. It comes together often, like today, that the things I learn from one are clearly manifest in the other. Today I am meeting with my editor to talk about my memoir, and editing is no longer as scary to me as it used to be. How can that be? How can I have gone from hating it to looking forward to it, secretly? It's not masochism - I don't look forward to criticism. But I look forward to finding fault so I can rework it into magic.

I feel the exact same way, 99% of the time, now about *myself* - if I have done something unhelpful, unbeneficial to myself or someone else, I want to know about it. I used to hate that, feel that I had been exposed, found out, that I was an imposter of a person who was secretly horrible. Now, it's more of a "Huh. Sorry about that. Now what can I do to make it better?"
I feel almost as if I am in the same place in my life, my meditation practice and my writing, especially right now.

So, I don't much care which came first for the moment. I just care that I am here.