A Type of Disconnect

  • It’s been a difficult thirteen months during shelter in place. From March 2020 to now (April 2021) many of us have felt a spectrum of emotions.

    Alison Flood eloquently captures what many of us are experiencing:

    After a month of lockdown, William Sutcliffe wrote on Twitter: “I have been a professional writer for more than twenty years. I have made my living from the resource of my imagination. Last night I had a dream about unloading the dishwasher.”

    Whether it is dealing with home schooling, the same four walls, or anxiety caused by the news, for many authors, the stories just aren’t coming.

    “Stultified is the word,” says Orange prize-winning novelist Linda Grant. “The problem with writing is it’s just another screen, and that’s all there is … I can’t connect with my imagination. I can’t connect with any creativity. My whole brain is tied up with processing, processing, processing what’s going on in the world.”

    Grant describes waking up in a fog, and not wanting to do anything but watch rubbish TV. Her mind is not relaxed enough, she says, to connect with her subconscious. “My subconscious is just basically screaming: ‘Get us out of this,’” she says, so there’s no space to create fiction. “I don’t have the emotional and intellectual energy to give to these shadowy people to bring them out of the shadows.”

    William Sutcliffe . . . has been trying to dream up his next book, and “that kind of work is really, really incompatible with lockdown and with this stage of pandemic fatigue.”

    Others, such as writer Gillian McAllister, are most affected by the lack of serendipitous glimpses of other lives. “I think authors take so much inspiration from things like the clothes a stranger is wearing, the smell of their perfume, their body language, seeing a couple interact in a bar,” she says. “I’m having to mine my memories for this stuff, which is less authentic and lacks a kind of specific detail that I like to write about in ordinary times.”

    Linda Grant has also felt “completely cut off from material. I felt I was forced into this interiority, when there was no exterior, no outside to engage with,” she reflects. “You don’t have those overheard conversations on buses, there’s no stimulus. It’s just a sort of sea of greyness, of timelessness.”

    As Grant points out, this is “a once in a blue moon example of every writer being affected by exactly the same situation.”

    So are we likely to be deluged, in a year’s time, with locked-room mysteries, or stream-of-consciousness novels about unloading the dishwasher? “It’s a massive problem for contemporary novelists, most of whose novels are set in a non-specific version of now,” says Sutcliffe. “You can write a novel set in 2013, 14, 15, but 2019, 20, 21, these are three completely different worlds.

    Excerpted from “Writer’s blockdown: after a year inside, novelists are struggling to write” by Alison Flood, The Guardian, February 19, 2021

  • Today’s guest blogger Nancy Julien Kopp muses about capturing and crystalizing a moment.

    The Wall Street Journal had an article profiling Maggie Smith, a contemporary poet. One of her quotes was simple but said a lot.

    “A poem doesn’t have to tell a story; it can just crystallize a moment.”

    I read it two or three times, then copied it on a notepad. 

    If you’ve ever been stopped by a beautiful sight or sound and wanted to write a poem, you’ll understand her thought to crystallize a moment.

    There’s no set number of verses to do that, no rhyming pattern, or anything else . . . just crystallize a moment.

    Maybe you’ve watched your children interacting, and there was a moment that you wanted to keep forever. It’s then that you should get that little notepad you keep nearby and jot down the thoughts you had. If you don’t do it right away, you’ll probably lose the intensity of the moment. 

    Early one morning, I went outside to pick up the newspaper, and I saw something that made me stop and watch and think. I wrote a poem about that one moment and what I saw in that tiny sliver of time, that took me to do a daily chore. It was a moment I wanted to remember, and the poem helped me do so.

    Message by Nancy Julien Kopp

    The cacophony of geese  

    caught my ear immediately  

    this cold, early morn, 

    as I claimed my newspaper

    on the still frosty driveway.

    I scanned the cloud-dense sky,

    paper clutched in hand,                                                              

    none sighted, but raucous honking

    pierced the dawn as they flew

    north from warmer climes.

    Yet, their message arrived with

    clarity, joy, and triumph.

    I smiled, knowing another spring

    will grace us one day soon. 

    Many nature poems are something we see for a moment, perhaps a quick glance at a colorful butterfly on a flowering bush. If that glimpse of something beautiful spoke to you, that’s when a poem might ‘crystallize’ the experience. It might be as simple as a haiku, or it could be a poem of several verses. 

    As you go about your day, use your writer’s eye to look for that exceptional moment or special sight, and pen a poem. You can ‘crystallize’ whatever it happens to be. 

    Nancy Julien Kopp lives and writes in the Flint Hills of Kansas. She has been published in various anthologies, including 23 times in Chicken Soup for the Soul books, websites, newspapers, and magazines and The Write Spot: Writing as a Path to Healing (available on Amazon both in paperback and as an e-reader)

    She writes creative nonfiction, poetry, fiction for middle grade kids, and short memoir.

    Nancy shares writing knowledge through her blog, Writer Granny‘s World by Nancy Julien Kopp with tips and encouragement for writers.

    Today’s photo is from the Queen Wilhelmina’s Tulip Garden, near the windmill in San Francisco. My crystalline moment.

  • Photo by Elena Bryan

    Guest Blogger Christine Walker:

    In the house where my husband and I live, there is a room we call the “library.” Books overflow the shelves. Along the walls, five bookcases contain hundreds of volumes stacked top to bottom, back to front, overhanging the edges. One shelf holds books by authors I know—friends, teachers, and teachers who became friends. More books are piled on the floor and in bags, but our local public library stopped taking donations because of the pandemic. The disarray — books, bags, file boxes needing to be sorted — mirrors my emotions. I need to make sense of this room and so much else in my life. 

    I’ve come looking for a paperback recommended for my zoom book group. I joined the group a year ago, on March 25th, 2020, two weeks after our county shut down for Covid on March 13th. That was the day my husband and I cancelled the memorial celebration we had scheduled for the 15th. The celebration was to be in honor of our 31-year-old son, who had passed away in early January. I didn’t intend to write about his death in this post, but I’ve come to know the truth of these lines from W.S. Merwin: “Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.”

    The zoom book group, meeting once a month on a Friday, has been a bright spot in a brutal year. Books provide solace and inspiration—reading them, talking about them, and having them on the shelves. As disorganized as my books appear, they are not a burden. They are touchstones in a time of no touching. How many other people are feeling this way? I google for recent headlines. AP News declares: “Publishing saw upheaval in 2020, but ‘books are resilient.’” The Guardian shouts: “Book sales defy pandemic to hit eight-year high.” Yahoo Finance testifies to “America’s love for books and reading habits” with stats from iDashboards: “Sales in the print book market increased 8% in 2020.”  

    This upbeat news for writers and readers brings me to my topic question: “Why write?” I can’t address “Why write?” without considering “Why read?” They are conjoined, like twins. I read to understand, feel more deeply, experience more widely, and walk in someone else’s shoes. I read to learn what I don’t know, remind myself of what I believe, question those beliefs, and see the world from other viewpoints. I write for the same reasons. 

    For all of my adult life, I’ve written in sketchbook journals about painting, creative process, and all else. I write professionally for clients as a creative consultant. But I didn’t identify myself as a writer until the publication of my first book, “A Painter’s Garden: Cultivating the Creative Life.” The book sprouted in 1995 as a letter to a friend who gave me a rose bush; it grew out of a desire to reclaim my joy after a challenging year, one very different from 2020; it branched from my journals into a nonfiction narrative chronicling my life as an artist, novice gardener, and mother of the young, exuberant, and beautiful boy who was our son, Quinn. After the book’s publication in October 1997, I wrote a short story that became longer and longer—soon a novel. I completed that novel and another manuscript and began a new one inspired by the diaries that my paternal grandmother kept during the Great Depression. I am grateful that she left a trace of her life through which I can experience the arduous and wonderfully happy times of my father’s family. I set the novel in 1932 and titled it “Tap Dancing at the Bluebird Buffet.” 

    My second published book, “Wooleycat’s Musical Theater,” which I illustrated and co-wrote with my husband came out in 2003. It had its inception years earlier in the songs that Dennis and I wrote during a challenging time of disappointments in our attempts to become parents. Our siblings and friends were growing their families, so we created music for our nephews, nieces, and friends’ children. The songs went out into the world in 1986 and Quinn was born in 1988. He was our greatest joy. 

    I entered a graduate writing program in 2004, completed a third novel as my thesis, and received an MFA in Writing and Literature in Fiction in 2006. Following graduation, I focused on revising the three completed novel manuscripts, as well as painting, creative consulting, and teaching. The story begun from my grandmother’s diaries beckoned me, and I made intermittent progress. 

    Five years ago, I evolved “Tap Dancing at the Bluebird Buffet” to take place in 1932, 1960, and 2016, ending on the eve of the election of our first woman President, Hillary Clinton. That didn’t work out the way I’d hoped. I put the book aside. In late autumn of 2019, I was again working on the novel. I was unsure of how I would end it, just as I was unsure of how I would accomplish all of my ambitions in art, creative consulting, and writing in the coming year. During that first week of January 2020, I wrote resolutions and affirmations, feeling energized and full of promise, visualizing what might be. 

    Losing Quinn was a tragedy beyond imagining. In the aftermath of his death, I tried working on the novel. I didn’t know how to re-enter it, nor could I manage the mental acrobatics involved in constructing a novel. I was in disarray, depleted, despairing. Grief fogged my brain. Although I know how to craft fiction, I couldn’t organize my notes, much less sustain an interest in my imagined characters and story. 

    Joining the Friday zoom book group helped. In March of 2020, I couldn’t write a novel, but I could read one for discussion with a group of kind, interesting, and intelligent women. My friend Vicki, who invited me into the group, asked if I also wanted to have weekly talks with her about our novels in progress. The book group gave me renewed structure around my own teaching and learning philosophy of “read to write books” and heartened me to that purpose. The novel talks were an added boost. I started writing again on “Tap Dancing.” Hopefully, I would write a book that I wanted to read and that the women in the book group would eventually enjoy reading too. 

    By May, in deep grief over missing my son, I was also feeling renewed by reading and talking about books. Though isolated due to Covid, I was painting, taking walks with Dennis, and enjoying the spring season. Every day, sometimes several times a day, I’d pull up on my computer desktop a photo of Quinn and talk to him. I felt bereft of him, and writing the novel only took me further away to a time and place that didn’t include him. One day, it occurred to me to change a main character in the novel to embody many of my son’s characteristics: the way he moved, spoke, and laughed; his philosophies, strengths, and vulnerabilities. My Kip character is of another era and background. He is not Quinn, but I’ve given him some of Quinn’s essence. Now while writing the novel, I can spend time with my son through Kip. I have regained an ability to focus my thinking and juggle the elements of fiction.

    Reimagining the story with a character informed by my son charged the novel with new life and intention. I am writing to learn about love and forgiveness, dancing and longevity, memory and time. I am writing because the story I’ve created is a place to go unlike any other available to me. I am writing because I would like to hold this book in my hands one day, read excerpts aloud at book events, and place it on my shelf, along with books I love written by authors who have give me reasons to write and read. The reasons to write become lessons for Writing Resilient. Here are just a few:

    Lesson: Write to discover.

    Ask questions of yourself and others. Seek to discover and understand. Put disparate thoughts and observations together. Let free associations reveal new meanings. Revise and revise to discover more.

    Lesson: Write to remember.

    Write and draw in journals, diaries, or on paper that can be collected into a notebook or box. This writing is not for publication, though it could be. Leave a trace of your life, your thoughts, how today looks and feels. It’s a compost pile, fertile and rich. 

    Lesson: Write to read.

    Throughout good times and bad—wars, pandemics, economic depression, crises—people read and write books. If there isn’t a book that satisfies you now, maybe it’s because the one you want to read is within you. If it’s also one that you want to write, then begin.

    Lesson: Write to thank. 

    Write a letter. Thank someone for his or her gift. Speaking to a specific someone helps you to establish your voice. Be grateful. Discover what you’re grateful for and why. Discover what’s missing.

    Lesson: Write to leap.

    The word resilient comes from the Latin “Resilire”—to leap back. “Resilience” means “capable of returning to an original shape or position, as after having been compressed.” Being resilient is being tensile—capable of being stretched or extended.

    Francis Weller, a psychotherapist, author, and soul activist says, “The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and be stretched large by them.”

    I have a photo of my son in mid-leap across stones along a Sonoma coast beach. I imagine that somewhere in the great beyond he is leaping among the stars. I direct the character in my novel to leap with buoyance and grace. I write to feel alive and remember the joy.

    Christine Walker is a visual artist, writer, strategic visioning facilitator, and teacher whose guiding principle for fruitful creative process is: “Artful vision. Heartfelt action.” She has an MFA in Writing and Literature in Fiction from Bennington Writing Seminars and an MA in Creative Arts Interdisciplinary from San Francisco State. She is the author and artist of “A Painter’s Garden: Cultivating the Creative Life,” a memoir on creative process illustrated by her paintings, and the co-author and illustrator of “Wooleycat’s Musical Theater,” a children’s book with song CD.

    She writes novels and short stories and teaches writing through her frameworks “Writing Fiction: 9 Ways to Mastery” and “Read to Write Books,” which are inspired by careful reading of masterful authors.

    Christine Walker’s website, blog, and more:

    Artist & Author site

    Blog: Exploring fiction craft for writers and readers

    Online course: Writing Fiction: 9 Ways to Mastery

    YouTube channel: Moments of Mastery videos on writing and creativity

  • Photo by Claudia Walen Larson

    Guest Blogger Rhonda Gerhard writes:

    Anniversaries are a time of reflection, whether it be for a celebration, like a wedding, or the loss of a loved one.

    We are now marking the anniversary of shutdown due to COVID.

    As we reflect back on this year, we can observe where we, both personally and as a people, are now, in this moment.

    Like many, I have observed myself navigate this past year on automatic pilot, at times not checking in, just marching ahead. Just marching is our need for survival.

    March is now here and time to reflect upon marching, right?

    With the availability now of the vaccine, and the possibilities for change ahead, we can pause. Take a deep breath and ask, “What is my deepest heartfelt prayer for myself at this time, right now?”

    “What do I really need for myself and how might I hold my life with compassion and awareness in this moment?”

    To honor our struggles and fortitude this past year, I am offering free weekly drop-in meditations from 4-4:50 (PST) on Wednesdays through March.

    This type of meditation is usually done in a lying down position, and is called Yoga Nidra. Nidra means sleep, and although we are not sleeping and dreaming, one goes into a deep state of relaxation in which brain waves slow down. This deep dive into our being produces a state of relaxation that many say feels like one has had a very refreshing nap. While in this deep state, we observe and inquire into the various layers of ourselves: physical, energetic, feelings and thoughts, and opening to a sense of peace and well-being.

    For more information and the zoom link, please contact Rhonda Gerhard to sign up through her email: helpmerhondanow@sbcglobal.net

    Rhonda Gerhard is a Certified Yoga Teacher, Licensed MFT psychotherapist, writer, and photographer. Since 1994 she has enjoyed guiding and teaching meditation, yoga and mindfulness practices and workshops with groups and individuals throughout the Bay Area. Her passion for Buddhist psychology and non-dualism has led her to study with several teachers including Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, Daniel Siegel, M.D., the works of Adyashanti and many more.

    An iRest®/Yoga Nidra teacher, she has guided groups including the “At Home Within” program at COTS (Committee on the Shelterless) in Petaluma, Kaiser Permanente, Sonoma State University, and Integrative Yoga teacher training programs.

    She may also be seen playing tamboura accompanying sitar or sarode performances alongside her husband, Mark Gangadhar Gerhard, tabla musician.

    Blending psychology, meditation, mindfulness, and asana practice, Rhonda integrates mind, body, and spirit in her work with others.

  • I’ve been reading back issues of Tiny Lights and found this gem by Suzanne Byerley, published December 2000. Even though this was written twenty years ago, it’s a perfect piece to share with you in these days of restlessness, as we wade through difficult times to find inspiration and energy to write.—Marlene Cullen

    “Steps” by Suzanne Byerley.

    I find myself restless. I prowl about the house in my slippers making sure the cats are behaving themselves, sorely tempted to turn on CNN and see if Florida has picked the next president yet. Maybe I’ll lay out a game of solitaire or fumble through that little Bach prelude my daughter mastered when she was six. What is this wild drive to diversion? Why not just sit down and get at what makes me happy? Why not just get busy and write?

    Because the steps to the desk are like slogging bootless through the deepest muds of winter. It is only after the first sentence has made its way through the synapses, the words clicking into place like pictures in a one-armed bandit, that I can begin again.

    It’s always more daunting when life intervenes, as it has lately, when loss comes crashing in. I’m not sure how to climb up from long silence to sight and voice again. Was I ever a writer? I must once have known how to polish a paragraph. I have vague memories of once or twice finding just the right word. Maybe rereading the last poem or story somebody praised will bolster my confidence sufficiently, but today when I look, it seems obvious some alien being wrote those words, not me.

    Still, this is the day I’ve promised myself was mine, so I stumble to the bookshelf to search out some shred of insight. “The eye must be alert; must see the influence of one thing on another and bring all things into relation,” says Robert Henri in The Art Spirit. As if my eye could ever do that. “The background as put in in the beginning may have been excellent, but the work that has gone on I front of it may demand its total reconstruction.”

    That hits home, I feel like so much has gone on that I’m in need of total reconstruction. I think of the Henri paintings I saw last month at the tiny American Impressionist Museum in New Britain, Connecticut, when I sneaked a week away from teaching to visit my daughter, Tanya, and grandson, Andrew, and smell the leaves of a real autumn. I have always thought Henri’s book one of the best for artistic inspiration of any kind, and it was pure pleasure to look on his few paintings there in an old mansion with the October sun streaming through the window. How many times had he gone back to get a painting just right? Had he said to himself, “I like what’s in front but the background’s all wrong,” as I have often said of my own emerging story, “too much detail” or “not enough glue?”

    I slip Henri back into his place on the shelf and pick up the framed snapshot of my mother, my father, my brother, and me. I am three, smiling on the knee of my father, my legs crossed. I wear the wine-colored beret my grandmother has crocheted with a row of white angora around the edge. I remember the softness of the angora, the scratchiness of the wine-colored wool. On my feet are sandals, almost hidden in shadow.

    And I think of the sandals I took with me from my mother’s house last year when she died. I had left my shoes in a motel by accident. A bit reluctantly, I picked up Mom’s from the floor of the closet I was emptying and put them on. I wore the sandals far into last winter, soothed by the contours of my mother’s feet cushioning my own. In this snapshot, though, her hair is black and thick and she is smiling, I notice, the same smile I thought I caught on the face of my grandson last month. My grandson, just the age I was in this photo, sitting on my father’s knee, sandals on my feet.

    I just told my students yesterday to contemplate shoes. Shoes of theirs or of someone they knew. A baby’s sneaker or a grandfather’s slipper. A shoe tossed a few feet from a body buried in an earthquake or twisted on a village road in Israel. An old man I know wears one shoe with a four-inch sole to try to even the discrepancy in the length of his legs. He walks with a great, rolling gait, his eyes full of secrets.

    How much for granted we take our locomotion, our ability to stroll or skip or dance through life. Andrew and I danced last month for the first time, wildly, in the preschool parking lot strewn with oak leaves. When my father broke his hip a year before he died he could not longer walk, let alone dance, but back in the Roaring Twenties when he was still in his teens he had been a dance instructor, and he began my lessons early. His shoes were always shined. When I close my eyes I can see the gleam and flash as he laughed at my bouncing and taught me a new step. As I stand here, I can hear the sweet and rhythmic “shuf, shuf, shuf” they made gliding across the room. I am shaken by the sound. And I see beyond the past to the joy of Andrew, so thrilled with music, so filled with movement that he can’t stand still.

    I put the snapshot back on the shelf, go into my closet and put on my mother’s sandals, marveling at the touch of them, warm as her hand. Then I come back to my study and turn to the desk, ready now to put my fingers to the keys. How do I begin again? With feeling. With love, or joy, or pain. Out of strong emotion the words begin to flow. Don’t interfere once they start. Don’t bring too much brain power to bear on them. Use that great rush which comes from sadness or surprise from memory, from what is real. That rush which clears our eyes just long enough to glimpse the connection between past and present, between longing and desire. All of us have experienced it. We writers lie in wait for it, not always patiently, not always willingly, never with the easy confidence that it will come again, always grateful when it does.

    “There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual,” Henri reminds me. “Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. If one could but recall those visions by some sort of sign. It was in this hope that the arts were invented.” Yes, that’s why we write, to capture those moments. And it’s in that first rush of feeling that the capturing is done.

    I’ll interfere with the word order later. I’ll clean up the background later. There is always plenty of time for rewrite, for perfecting. But not just now. Just now, I’ve conquered that aimless restlessness, taken those first trusting steps and begun again.

    Originally published in Vol. 6 No. 2 of Tiny Lights, A Journal of Personal Essay, Susan Bono, Editor-in-Chief.

    Suzanne Byerley (1937-2013)

    M. Suzanne Hartman-Byerley, beloved writing teacher, accomplished writer and unflappable co-director of the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, influenced most of the writers living on the North Coast today. Recipient of a Hopwood Award and a Fulbright scholarship, her short stories and poems were published in magazines such as Woman’s Day, Family Circle and the Kansas Quarterly.


    After Suzanne and husband, Andrew, moved to the coast in l987 to run the Mendocino Gift Company, she taught writing at the Redwood Coast Senior Center and wrote for Coast and Valley and other publications. In 1996, she became co-director of the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference and an adjunct professor at College of the Redwoods. She founded the “Good Words” reading series and helped revive the Todd Point Review. When she and Andy moved back to Ohio in 2004, she continued to inspire writers at the Conneaut Community Center for the Arts and the Andover Public Library.

  • Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray has this to say:

    With anxiety and fear running high in the world these days, I wanted to share how we can make friends with these feelings and use them to our advantage. Anxiety and fear can prevent us from being creative or living a life we love. To live and create fully, we be must be willing again and again to step out of our old comfortable life and into unknown territory. This always feels scary.

    Many years ago I read the self-help book Feel the Fear, And Do It Anyway which presents the premise that just because we feel a sense of fear about a project or moving in a new direction in our lives doesn’t mean we are supposed to stop ourselves from proceeding.

    More recently I’ve been fine-tuning my understanding of what this really means and feels like, how to best use it in my life and creative work, and how it fits the idea of following my internal guidance of my intuition and heart to bring my soul and creative gifts into the world. Any time I stretch in a new direction in my writing or my personal and professional life I have to step out of my comfort zone which gives rise to a feeling of anxiety.

    I’ve found it’s important to learn to distinguish between the kind of anxiety that represents our bodily intuition signaling a real threat (like don’t walk down that dark alley or that new relationship really isn’t good for you or that’s really not the best art project for you to pursue) versus the kind of anxiety we feel when we step out of our comfort zone in a way that stretches our capacities, capabilities and sense of self. The anxiety that is genuinely trying to warn us off feels heavy with fear whereas the anxiety that simply marks stepping out of our comfort zone has a sense of exhilaration to it.

    When I’m at my desk writing and I start to feel a lot of resistance, if I make myself sit in the chair and keep writing, (even when I desperately want to get up and make phone calls or clean the refrigerator), I find that I will usually move through the anxiety into what I really want to say and find myself very excited by the work that results. The same is true every time I do anything new in my life that feels like a stretch. I feel nervous and excited whenever I push past the feeling of fear and take action to make the new idea or vision happen.

    When you are trying to decide what the fear or anxiety is trying to tell you, just take some deep breaths and get clear on the exact quality of the feeling in your body: whether you feel contracted or expanded by the thought of what you desire. If you feel expanded then you need to “feel the fear” that comes with it and begin to take action however small toward achieving your desire. Also new neuroscience shows that the simple act of naming or labeling a negative emotion like fear calms the brain which makes it easier to get clear on what to do.

    Wishing you many blessings and creative flow, Suzanne

    Check out Suzanne’s coaching opportunities:

    Creativity Coaching, Creative Life Coaching, Writing Process Coaching & EFT Sessions

    EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques)

    CREATIVE LIFE COACHING

    CREATIVITY COACHING

    Creativity Goes Wild Blog

  • Guest Blogger Lisa Alpine shares tips to spice up your writing.

    I encourage you to infuse your writing with detailed imagery, passionate feeling, poetic depth and evocative sensual description. Here are some writing suggestions I use when teaching Spice Up Your Writing at workshops globally.

    These writing tips will show you how to weave poetic description into your prose; cultivate the five senses in describing a place or experience; and develop emotional imagery.

    1: Pick a scene from an event in your life that you know has a heart or seed of a story only you can write. Now blurt and spew! Messy is okay. You can clean it up later. Sometimes graceful, sometimes awkward, sometimes downright ugly. Tell the story. Understand what is really going on by exploring and uncovering the deeper currents of the river of life.

    2: Set the scene. Describe the weather, doors & windows, environment, horizon. God is in the details. What type of tree? What color the sea? Name everything.

    3: Sensual awakening using all six senses: smell, sight, taste, sound, touch, & intuition. Don’t ignore the 6th sense –even if it doesn’t make sense—it can lead into the heart of what is really going on.

    (See Note from Marlene for links to posts about using the sixth sense and intuition for writing inspiration.)

    How do you write about sensual interaction in a real way? It could describe the touch of a baby’s cheek against yours; or the physical sensation of your lover’s weight on you. It might be the reaction to the smell on a bus. By the way—smell is the hardest sense to describe accurately—yet the most evocative.

    4: Building tension. Like thunder in the distance, good suspense keeps us hanging on with tension and release, pain and epiphany. Not just emotional content, but placement and description of objects and sensations, even weather descriptions can lead into the deeper places by scene setting and nuance.

    A nerve is exposed and it hurts, it zings with sensation—it calls attention to it. Listen to these electrical zings. The story is there in the current lines that jolt you awake.

    5: Add emotional qualities. What is interesting about the word feeling is that it covers both the sensual and tactile experiences along with the gamut of emotions.

    6: Dig beyond generic descriptions so that your writing comes uniquely alive for readers and immerses them in the story.

    Give yourself an hour to work a scene with these suggestions and see if it opens up your writing and captures the essence of what flows underneath the obvious so that your story pops and zings, cries and sings.

    Lisa Alpine is a renowned dance teacher, travel writer, and author of Dance Life: Movin’ & Groovin’ Around the Globe, Wild Life: Travel Adventures of a Worldly Woman and Exotic Life: Travel Tales of an Adventurous Woman.

    Her award-winning, dynamically delicious stories grace the pages of many anthologies, including Travelers’ Tales Best Travel Writing.

    When not wrestling with words, exploring the ecstatic realms of dance, swimming with sea creatures, or waiting for a flight, Lisa divides her time between Mill Valley, California and the Big Island of Hawai’i, where Pele’s lava licks at the edges of her writing retreat.

    Note from Marlene:

    The Sixth Sense.

    Trust Your Intuition for Creative Writing

  • Today’s guest blogger, Mary Mackey, is a gem in a treasure chest filled with innovative inspiration for writers.

    Mary shares her unique perspective on accessing creative writing.

    Your unconscious is packed with ideas, metaphors, visions, plots, dreams, colors, characters, emotions—in short, everything you need to write a great visionary novel. But how do you get to it? How do you step out of the social agreement we call “reality,” and dip into this incredibly rich resource?

    You could go to sleep and try to mine your dreams, but even if you dreamed an entire novel, the moment you woke up, you would forget most of it within seconds, because you hadn’t processed the ideas into your long-term memory. Worse yet, when you dream, you are not in control, so you can’t do specific things like talk to one of your characters or work out a specific plot problem. Granted, some people manage lucid dreaming, but lucid dreaming is not a practical writing technique for a number of reasons. For example, you cannot always go to sleep when you need to.

    Many years ago, I started looking for a technique that would allow me to be asleep and awake at the same time. What I came up with, after much trial and error, was a form of creative trance that allows me to delve into my unconscious whenever I want to, get the material I need for my poems and novels, bring that material up to my waking reality, remember it, and write it down.

    Developing this technique wasn’t easy. Besides relying on my own imagination, I drew on many sources such as self-hypnosis, theta cycle sessions, neurophysiology, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, and the Surrealist technique of Automatic Writing.  As you might expect, I had many failures, but in the end I came up with a deceptively simple technique, which has proved extremely effective. Since I taught myself how to use creative trance, I have written many novels, collections of poetry, and screenplays. Better yet, I have avoided writers’ block.

    I’ve used my creative trance technique weekly, sometimes daily, for many years. As with all things that are visionary and out of the range of ordinary consciousness,  it can’t be completely described in words, only experienced. So, since I cannot sit down with you and personally guide you through the process step by step, I am going to give you a chance to get a feel for it by taking you into the heart of  my creative process as I worked on my most recent novel, The Village of Bones.

    The Village of Bones is Visionary Fiction, but even in my novels which are not visionary (such as my bestseller A Grand Passion, the story of three generations of women involved in ballet), I created most of the original storyline in a voluntarily induced creative trance.

    Unlike A Grand Passion, The Village of Bones presented a special problem. On one hand, it was meticulously researched historical fiction firmly based on archaeological evidence, yet at the same time, it was set in Prehistoric Europe in Goddess-worshiping cultures that were filled with myths, visions, and prophecies.

    With this contradiction in mind, I put my phone in Airplane Mode, sat down in a comfortable chair, picked up a pen (I find computers get in the way), opened my notebook, closed my eyes, took several deep breaths, and counted backwards to ten, imagining as I did so that I was walking down a flight of stairs. By the time I got to the bottom, I was in a light trance. The word “light” is important. I was neither awake nor asleep. Instead, I was poised on the threshold between my conscious mind and my unconscious mind, ready to move in either direction. 

    On this particular day, I had some work planned. Sabalah, my main character, was in big trouble. She was caught in a storm, her boat had turned over, and she was drowning. As she struggled to stay afloat, she going to have a vision of the Sea Goddess that might or might not be a hallucination. There were no surviving statues of this particular Neolithic Sea Goddesses as far as I knew, so my task for this afternoon was to envision the Sea Goddess so I could describe her.

    I started with the Goddess’ name which I had created the previous day: “Amonah, Amonah, Amonah,” I silently chanted. “Come to me.. A vague, shadowy form began to materialize behind my eyelids. 

    Before I go on, I want to be clear about what was happening. As I thought the word Amonah, I didn’t believe I was conjuring up a real spirit, channeling a mystical force, or having a religious experience. I believed, and still believe, that I was simply unlocking the resources of my own consciousness and my own imagination using the very practical tool of creative trance. I don’t claim to know where these visions come from, but I am convinced that under the right conditions, anyone can have them.

    The form grew brighter and more distinct. I saw a woman walking toward me across the waves. Walking on water. Interesting. Since question/answer is the key to this technique, I settled down and began to ask myself questions.

    “What color is her hair?” I asked myself. “Black, brown, blonde?” Suddenly the word “seaweed” came into my mind. Instantly, the woman’s hair turned green.

    “What kind of jewelry is she wearing? Diamonds, topaz, garnets?” No, she’s wearing pearls, and something else, something reddish, something like . . . coral!

    “What color are her eyes?” For a moment her eyes shifted back and forth between brown and green. Then, suddenly they glowed. “Skin color?” All colors. No colors. She’s a Goddess. She is all of us.

    “What’s she wearing?” Not skinny jeans for sure. (Odd thoughts sometimes interrupt the flow of the trance). Long dress. Yes. She’s wearing a long dress. Wave-like. Blue of course like the sea.

    “What does she smell like? Wind, salt, kelp?” Like flowers.  She smells like flowers. “What kind of flowers?” Roses.

     “How much does she weigh?” She weighs nothing. She’s a spirit.

    For a long time, I sat there asking specific questions and waiting for answers most of which came in the form of wordless images. For some reason, I never could figure out how tall She was. My unconscious wouldn’t give that one up. But by now the Sea Goddess Amonah looked real to me. I could see Her distinctly right down to the coral rings on Her toes.

    Slowly I began to count backwards from ten to one, moving out of the trance as I climbed back up the stairs toward waking consciousness. On every step, I paused and made myself visualize Amonah again, and I commanded myself: “Remember. Remember.”

    This final command to “remember,” is perhaps the most important part of a creative trance. If I couldn’t carry a complete image of Amonah back into the waking world, I’d have to start all over again.

    When I got to ten, I opened my eyes just wide enough to see my notebook. Grabbing my pen before the last bits of trance faded away, I quickly wrote everything down paying no attention to grammar, spelling, or logic. I even wrote down the silly bit about the skinny jeans.

    The result was not something I could use immediately. What you get out of your own unconscious is raw material. After creativity comes craft. Over the course of the next year, I polished this description of Amonah. I worked wide-awake, using all the techniques of novel-writing that I had learned over the years. I read the passage out loud over and over again. Searched for better words. Took out commas and put them in again. Here is the result:

    A woman emerged from the wall of crashing waves and walked across the sea toward Sabalah. Sabalah abruptly stopped crying and stared at the woman, stunned. This was impossible! . . .The woman kept walking, stepping over the waves as if they were furrows in a field of wheat. Her flowing dress was blue as a summer sea; her hair long and green, twined with seaweed and pearls. Her skin was dark and light at the same time, her eyes so bright, they glowed like the last flash of the sun when it falls into the sea at midsummer. . .  A sweet scent suddenly filled the air like the perfume of roses blown across water.

    “Don’t be afraid,” the woman said. “I am Amonah, Goddess of the Sea,” and water is my path. I can walk above or beneath it as I wish.

    Sitting down beside Sabalah, Amonah let Her feet dangle in the water. They were bare except for toe rings of rose-colored coral. She must have weighed nothing, because the end of the mast didn’t tilt the way it would have it a flesh-and-blood human being had sat there.

     The Village of Bones was formed from scores of similar visions, as were all the poems I wrote that year, and even part of one of the screenplays which I co-wrote with director Renée de Palma.

    Using creative trance is a gentle, pleasant way to create the raw materials for a work of fiction. It is not like meditation because your goal is not transcendence. It is not like many forms of self-hypnosis because you are not trying to lose weight, stop smoking, or change your behavior in any way. It is not like prayer, because you are not seeking a closer relationship with God. Creative trance is a tool, a key if you will, that lets you unlock the riches you already have stored in your own unconscious.

    Yet its power should not be underestimated. So let me leave you with a warning: If you decide to go deeply into your own unconscious, you have to be ready to deal with what you find there. Creative trance is not therapy. If you are upset, unhappy, depressed, or anxious, wait until you have a calm mind and specific writing goals and can set firm limits on what you will accept from your unconscious.  

    When you are in a creative trance, you should always be in control. If your Goddess appears before you with a hairdo made of snakes, you should be able to instantly turn those vipers into cobwebs and seaweed. Nothing you experience should harm you, scare you, or make you uncomfortable for more than a few seconds. A creative trance should be enjoyable from start to finish.

    In The Village of Bones, the Goddess Earth gives Her people six commandments. The First Commandment is: “Live together in love and harmony.” The Sixth is: “Enjoy yourselves, for your joy is pleasing to Her.”

    Resources:

    Syllabi for courses in Women’s Visionary Fiction, Women’s Visionary Poetry, and Women’s Visionary Film can be found on Mary Mackey’s Educators Page.

    Mary Mackey, Ph.D. is a New York Time best-selling author who writes novels, poetry, and film scripts. A Professor Emeritus of English at California State University, Sacramento, she is the author of fourteen novels and eight collections of poetry including The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, winner of the 2019 Erich Hoffer Award for Best Book Published by a Small Press and a 2018 Women’s Spirituality Book Award; and  Sugar Zone, winner of the 2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award.

    Garrison Keillor featured her poetry four times on The Writer’s Almanac. Her novels have made The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller Lists and been translated into twelve languages.

    Her visionary novel The Village of Bones: Sabalah’s Tale is a prequel to the three novels in her best-selling  Earthsong Series (The Year the Horses Came, The Horses at the Gate, and The Fires of Spring).

    Mary welcomes your questions and comments at www.marymackey.com  where, you can sample her work, read her interview series People Who Make Books Happen, learn more tricks for avoiding Writers Block, and sign up to get the latest news about her fiction and poetry.

    Mary’s literary papers are archived at the Sophia Smith Special Collections Library at Smith College in Northampton, MA.

    Note from Marlene: The creative trance that Mary describes might also be accessible with meditation. Katie Holmes, data scientist & chief editor for OutwitTrade has compiled stories on the benefits of meditation.

  • Guest Blogger, Bev Scott, has an interesting perspective on bias of our history. She brings up provocative questions.

    The following is based on a session Bev attended at the Historical Novel Society Conference in June 2017 by James J. Cotter, titled “The Lone Ranger was Black: Reintegrating Minority Viewpoints into Historical Fiction.”

    “The title intrigued me,” wrote Bev. “Was the Lone Ranger modeled after Bass Reeves, the first black U.S. deputy marshal who worked thirty-two years in the Arkansas and Oklahoma territories in the late 1800’s?  He may have been.”

    History Is Biased

    The conference session addressed the issue of bias in our history. That bias impacts authors of historical fiction. Today we no longer view history as “the truth.” Rather, history is a story told through the lens of the teller. Did you love the Lone Ranger when you were growing up? I did. Audiences assumed he was a courageous (and white) lawman.  That’s how the story was told.

    Readers of historical fiction express their fondness for this genre because they like a particular historical period. Plus, they enjoy learning from fiction set in an historical context. Readers also expect accurate history in the stories they read. So, historical fiction writers have a responsibility to the historical record. But what record?

    Finding Alternative Viewpoints

    And so arises the key question for authors of historical fiction. How do we tell stories and develop characters with lives extremely different from our own given the bias of historical sources? How do we find alternative viewpoints? And, how can we do justice to the painful experiences of non-dominant characters in our stories?

    Consider the story of Custer’s Last Stand or the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne people believed they were betrayed. The U.S. government ignored their treaty rights after gold was discovered on native lands. White Americans believed the Indians were wild, bloodthirsty and stubborn, refusing to move to the reservation. Many of us learned only the white American history version growing up.

    Bass Reeves and The Lone Ranger

    When we watched and admired the fictional Lone Ranger as children, we accepted how he was portrayed. Yet, he probably reflected the real-life story of Bass Reeves, a former slave. Reeves gained fame through his exploits and imposing stature of 6’2.” The first black lawman west of the Mississippi, he cut a striking figure on his large gray (almost white) horse. Reeves wore his trademark black hat and twin .45 Colt Peacemakers cross-draw style. Bullets never touched him, although he brought in 3000 criminals alive and 14 dead, whom he killed in self-defense. 

    Reeves earned the name “the Indomitable Marshall.” He left silver dollars behind as his calling card. Similar to the fictional Lone Ranger, Reeves developed friendships with Native Americans and learned their languages. He also used disguises to capture those he pursued. The racism in our culture probably prevented the Lone Ranger hero from being portrayed as a black lawman.

    “Who WAS that Masked Man?” Was it Bass Reeves?

    Multiple narratives combine to become a complete historical narrative. We often learn only one limited narrative part. For example, most stories about homesteaders portray them as white. They settle on the prairie, risk their lives and battle extreme conditions. Yet, in researching my historical novel, Sarah’s Secret, I discovered a little-known town in Kansas called Nicodemus. This town drew freed slaves to homestead in the surrounding area after the Civil War.

    Offering an Opposing Voice

    As writers of historical fiction, we have an obligation to readers to offer an accurate portrayal of both our characters and the historical context. Our discussion in this conference session emphasized the importance of deep knowledge and experience of the culture in which our story is set. And further, writers must recognize the historical biases of the sources we are using. This is especially important if the writer is writing in a cultural context other than her own.

    Writing historical fiction gives an opportunity to balance the bias of history by including an opposing voice of the non-dominant group in the story. Since my protagonist, Sarah was traveling north by wagon through Kansas to return to Nebraska and her family, I chose to add such voice. Thus, Sarah and her children unexpectedly encounter a black family in the middle of Kansas living near Nicodemus.

    Sarah follows a narrow path with her seriously ill daughter to find help. She discovers a welcoming family descended from former slaves. Luckily, the family shares their modest home for several days while Sarah nurses her daughter back to health. Her sons have fun with the son of the family. The plot gives an opportunity to include an opposing voice to traditional bias. Sarah tells her concerned son stories about her own and her father’s rejection of slavery. She tells of their support for the Union in the Civil War and her family’s generosity toward “Negro” families when she was a child.

    Originally posted on Bev Scott’s blog on July 11, 2017, with photos that are not included in this post.
    Bev Scott will be one of the Writers Forum‘s presenters on February 18, 2021.