MIA

Yes, I have been missing in action... in the action of writing on a daily basis and posting weekly. Hell, I haven't even posted annually in a number of years.

But... this summer I went to Taos and spent a week with Natalie Goldberg and 30 other women and 2 men. We had writing practice.

What's that?

Just what it says... we practiced writing. We read other authors... I'd never read James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. (I still can remember exquisite lines from it!) We meditated... We stretched... our bodies... and our courage to write about the underbelly of relationships.

We learned to trust ourselves to rite what we needed to discover about ourselves.

We learned to write badly in order to break down the fear we had of writing the truth, writer's block be damned.

We learned to listen, really listen to each other's literary voice.

It wasn't about plot outlines or character development or marketing secrets... it was about the core of what writers must do--just as musicians d0--practice.

Just practice.


Prompt: What do you need to practice?

Listen to your body

I'm teaching a class at the Jung Center. Last week I gave the participants a prompt to write about in class and gave them 10 minutes. It's called freewriting by most people--I call it a fast write--because you don't really have time to think. Just write as quickly as you can about the topic and see what bubbles up. Sometimes people can be surprised because their unconscious breaks through.

The prompt was: Listen to your body. What is it telling you?

This is what I wrote:

My fingers are taped but still bleeding--I cannot scribble these words without pain. The soles of my feet are so dry that I have deep cuts on my insole and on my heels--I cannot walk w/o pain. My eyes are tired--I rub them red, and I lick my dry lips. I'm shriveling, like a dried orange peel, once moist but now parchment. I'm dry and cracked as a desert under a merciless sun. I am parched. Where is the water? I need to find the fountain and drink my fill or die.

Write it, record it, photograph it... capture it!

This morning I was having a conversation with a colleague about social networks, blogs, discussion boards and other e-communications. (My colleague is the college's web master and the resident guru on electronic communications.) He made a comment that really hit home with me. He opined that information is becoming so instantaneous and so disposable that we are losing our history--our personal and institutional memory--of the ways things evolve and how they are connected. We have the attitude that if something didn't happen in our lifetime, we don't really care. It's ancient history.



For example, everyone in my age group can tell you where he or she was when John Kennedy was shot. College students weren't born yet, and so, if the truth be told, they don't really get engaged when the subject is brought up. The same is true when students are asked to analyze the significance of MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech. Even 9/11 is rapidly becoming "ancient history" belonging to older siblings because this year's college freshmen were in the 5th grade and only remember that their teacher was crying or that they got to go home early. It didn't have the same impact on them as it did on, say, their older sister or brother who was a senior and in the student ROTC program.



My point is, one of the strengths of sharing the stories of our lives is that we lived it--and we need to share those stories so that when our younger siblings or children experience crises--and they will--that they can find solace and hope in our struggle and survival.

Writing prompt: Write about the rising price of gasoline and how it has changes your daily life.

Music and memories

I went to the the store this morning and bought a copy of Richard Simmons' Sweatin' to the Oldies, 20th anniversary edition. I've been trying to find a way to start moving my body again. Inertia is a powerful barrier to overcome. But Richard is a skilled motivator, and the oldies are just the elixir to get me high enough to swing my hips and shake my bootee.

What is it about the music of our youth? Well, quite frankly, because it is the music of our youth, we feel an energy that electrifies us. I'm not 62... or even 26. I'm 16 again, and with a sense of wonder about the world outside of Huntsville, TX, and a sense of adventure to explore edges of propriety. Great Balls of Fire! Okay, okay... Great Balls of Fire was actually popular in 1957, but it was still requested often on the "Pick-a-Tune" program on KSAM radio. My older brother Stone liked the tune a lot, so naturally I did too. I remember reading in one of the gossip magazines at the drugstore about Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his thirteen year old cousin. Mercy me! In a couple of years I could be marrying someone famous and leaving my little bitty hometown. The possibilities in my future boggled my imagination.

Fast forward. It's My Party (Leslie Gore, 1963) was a recurring theme during 1963. My boyfriend Jimmy broke up with me to date a classmate, and she had the nerve to request this song in my name on Pick-a-Tune. (Yes, Pick-a-Tune was a long running program that adolescents adored.) I, of course, took great delight in requesting Judy's Turn to Cry in her name when Jimmy returned to me by summer.

Neither of us ended up with tall, lanky, sexy Jimmy Scott, but we sure sharpened our claws on each other's psyche. I remember that I left her something in my senior will (remember those?) and it was very, very catty. Oh the drama of young lives.

Writing Prompt: Listen to some of the songs popular during your high school years and write about the memories the songs conjure up.

Weeds of busy-ness

The weeds of busy-ness are taking over my life. Why can't I be content to "be" in life instead of constantly "doing"? It's as if I don't think my life counts unless I've got seven projects going at the same time.

This is NOT productive; this IS stressful.

I took an online test to find out my actual age (as opposed to my chronological one) and to get a prediciton for how much longer I will live, given my current lifestyle.

Bad news. If I keep going like I am, I'll be dead in less than two years.

I need to refocus on becoming a human being and retire from my merry-go-round of doing project after project after project, which does nothing more than drain me. It's not as if someone else couldn't do these things. It wouldn't even matter if these projects fell by the wayside and were left unfinished. (I'm telling you, no one would notice except me.)

Wow, that's a revelation.


Prompt: Write about the busy-ness that is taking over your life.

Why write memoir?

Every so often I feel sort of guilty about being so enchanted with writing about my life--my childhood, my religion, my heritage, my family, my values, my, my, my, and me, me, me.

However, as a race of people, we are intrigued by our history and by our personal journeys through this life. We write to preserve our experience, and we write to understand and make peace with our past, and we write to share what we've learned.

Anne Lamott writes: "There is a door we all want to walk through, and writing can help you find it and open it. Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can help you wake up." (Bird by Bird, 1995)


Prompt: What "door" to the past do you want to open?

Holiday Madness

It's that time again... hurry, hurry, hurry. Time's running out. Have you made the list? Checked it twice? Did you order the turkey from Greenberg?

Yes, the holidays are hectic. But they are also times when family and friends get together and reminesce. This holiday season you may want to set up the video (off in the corner but with a wide-angle view so that it captures everyone sitting at the table) and have each person tell a favorite story about someone else at the table.

For example, if I were sitting at the table with my two brothers and my parents, I'd tell the story about the time my older brother put everything on his hamburger--everything except the beef, that is. He had tomatoes, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions... you get the picture. It wasn't until my dad noticed there was a beef patty left on the plate and asked, "Who didn't get a burger?" that my brother discovered he'd left out the most important ingredient--meat! The ending of the story is that he ended up having two sandwiches that night... one meatless and one with beef!

This happened when my older brother was six or seven. He is sixty-four now, but we still laugh till our bellies hurt when we remember that summer evening when he was almost finished with his sandwich before he looked between the bun and asked, "Where's my beef?"

Okay, you get the idea. Your turn...