Deserving To Be Told

Union Square

"One of the arguments we often use for not writing is this: "I have nothing original to say. Whatever I might say, someone else has already said it, and better than I will ever be able to."  

This, however, is not a good argument for not writing. Each human person is unique and original, and nobody has lived what we have lived. Furthermore, what we have lived, we have lived not just for ourselves but for others as well. Writing can be a very creative and invigorating way to make our lives available to ourselves and to others.  

We have to trust that our stories deserve to be told. We may discover that the better we tell our stories the better we will want to live them."

-Henri Nouwen

Divesting

Sometimes I struggle with what to write in this space.

Maybe because I have all these (mostly self-imposed) expectations of what I should be writing.

(And what I should be thinking… should be feeling…etc.)

Gotta break out of that land of Should Be, you know? Because any writing I try to do in that Should Be voice comes out stilted and posturing and all around blah.  It's just not me.  And it's just not fun.

So what if I forgot all about the Should Be’s, and what if I just wrote whatever I was genuinely thinking and feeling...?

Duly Noted

A Bull Mastiff named Billy Bob, Riverside Park

Fact: I haven’t posted here in a week.

Another Fact: I wrote a lengthy post last Thursday but didn’t publish. It was written in anger, and things written in anger are often cathartic but seldom edifying. So it will have to remain a draft until I calm down and figure out what my point is/was.

An Additional Fact: I wrote half of another post last Friday; it was to be the kick-off to a blog series I’ve been plotting and planning for awhile. But when I signed online Saturday to finish said post, I noticed a news item that made this series seem less than in good taste, at least for the moment. So that’s in a draft holding-pattern, too.

One More Fact: Lots has been happening lately that I suppose I could write about, but I just haven’t felt so inspired. Excuses, excuses – writers who really want to write don’t get to blame lack of inspiration. They just need to show up and do the work. And I haven’t shown up this week. Maybe next week?

These are the facts of the matter - but the grace of the situation is that it's April - National Poetry Month - which I'll take as an 'out' - an excuse to substitute someone else's words to fill the void of my own.

And so here is a poem - of excellently arranged and inspired words - by Mr. Andrew Hudgins.


Day Job and Night Job
by Andrew Hudgins

After my night job, I sat in class
and ate, every thirteen minutes,
an orange peanut—butter cracker.
Bright grease adorned my notes.

At noon I rushed to my day job
and pushed a broom enough
to keep the boss calm if not happy.
In a hiding place, walled off

by bolts of calico and serge,
I read my masters and copied
Donne, Marlowe, Dickinson, and Frost,
scrawling the words I envied,

so my hand could move as theirs had moved
and learn outside of logic
how the masters wrote. But why? Words
would never heal the sick,

feed the hungry, clothe the naked,
blah, blah, blah.
Why couldn't I be practical,
Dad asked, and study law—

or take a single business class?
I stewed on what and why
till driving into work one day,
a burger on my thigh

and a sweating Coke between my knees,
I yelled, "Because I want to!"—
pained—thrilled!—as I looked down
from somewhere in the blue

and saw beneath my chastened gaze
another slack romantic
chasing his heart like an unleashed dog
chasing a pickup truck.

And then I spilled my Coke. In sugar
I sat and fought a smirk.
I could see my new life clear before me.
lt looked the same. Like work.

Glossing Over

At the opera last Thursday, Lincoln Center

Hello friends, and welcome to the second half of November!

Some of you may know November as NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) or NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month). I went a different direction, and decided to celebrate it as NaDoWriDaThiMo (National Don’t Write a Dang Thing Month).

Well, I think I need to change my course for the second half of November. Not writing isn’t working out very well for me. Writing is how I figure out what I think. Writing unclogs the drain that is my brain and exposes all the weird gunk that’s hanging out inside.

Writing is Liquid Plumber for my mind, if you will.

And if you won’t – because that was a rotten metaphor – then please blame NaDoWriDaThiMo. It messed me up good.

In any case, I’m back to the blog – spurred on by a topic that I felt deserved careful & immediate consideration:

Lip gloss.

Yesterday, I needed some new lip gloss. Yes, needed. Ladies, I’m sure you’re with me on this. Fellas, you’ll just have to take my word: Sometimes – sometimes! – new lip gloss is a veritable necessity and not a frivolous want. Trust me, because I’m speaking the truth here. Why would I lie about lip gloss??

So I dragged my color consultant, AK, with me to the nearest Sephora. I had a vision, and it was pale pink lips. Twiggy pale.

The first option we tried came close. Stila’s Plumping Lip Glaze in Vanilla Mint was definitely pale and pretty. But the plumping aspect made my lips burn. Burn bad. No good.

I tried to take off the gloss with a tissue, but that stuff was like glue. Make-up remover helped a little but my lips were still burning. Finally AK handed me a cotton swab with rubbing alcohol, which seemed to do the trick but tasted like licking a doctor’s office. (See? See what NaDoWriDaThiMo has done to my metaphors? Curses.)

The search continued. We cycled through Dior’s lip gloss options (peppermint-y! but did not make me look like Twiggy) followed by Clinique’s palest shade (not pale enough!) and then Smashbox's offerings (not even close).

Finally we arrived at Tarte, where AK selected a perfectly-pale pink lip gloss for me. We had a winner! And bonus: this product came with two different shades of gloss. Double the fun.

I asked AK what my selected shades were called, and she read off the packaging, "Ronald and Cindy."

Ronald? Ronald? My perfectly-pale pink lip gloss was named "Ronald"? That seemed a bizarre marketing choice.

Upon closer inspection, we noticed that all the lip gloss duos in this Tarte line were named after famous lovebirds: Anthony & Cleopatra, Fred & Ginger, Sandy & Danny. But...who were Ronald & Cindy?

The only famous Ronald I could think of (besides Ronald McDonald, and I don't remember him having a love interest) was Ronald Reagan. Did Ronnie have a wife before Nancy, and was her name Cindy? AK and I couldn't recall.

For a moment I was torn - I did not want to purchase Ronald Reagan lip gloss. That's the kind of thing that could get a girl nearly disowned, in my family.

But on the other hand - this was the *perfect* perfectly-pale pink shade of lip gloss. I just couldn't leave it behind. So I sighed, bought it, and brought it home with me.

(Being a girl is really, really hard. But I bet you already knew that.)

Later that evening, AK settled my moral/political/lip gloss quandry with the help of Google.

"Not Ronald Reagan!" she texted me. "Ronald & Cindy from "Can't Buy Me Love". Ronald = young Patrick Dempsey!"

A-ha! My lip gloss suddenly tasted a whole lot sweeter.

Linford Detweiler Just Wrote Me a Letter

Do you know that song that goes “My baby just wrote me a letter”? It popped, uninvited, into my head when I realized I myself had just been written a letter. Sure, this particular epistle went out to the entire Over the Rhine mailing list, but my little heart-of-hearts knows it was directed at yours truly, specifically and especially.

More than a quick bulleted list of upcoming shows, Linford Detweiler’s latest letter to OTR fans is a rambling reflection on his life as of late, living as an artist. When he referenced his writing process, my heart-of-hearts sat up and listened:

“I’ve been trying to write songs again, and I’ve been hitting a maze of dead ends. I want the songs to reveal something to me, teach me something. It’s slow going. I’m not sure where I’m going. Uncertainty abounds. But the writing works on me little by little and begins to change me. That’s why I would recommend not putting off writing if it’s something you feel called to: if you put it off, then the writing can’t do the work that it needs to do to you.

Yes, I think there’s something there. If you don’t do the work, the work can’t change you. (No one expects to change overnight.)

My sister Grace recently sent me this quote from a slim little volume called Art and Fear: “Uncertainty is the essential, inevitable and all-pervasive companion to your desire to make art. And tolerance for uncertainty is the prerequisite to succeeding.”

A blessing for the writers among us: May all your dead ends be beautiful.”

So true, Linford. So true. One night this week, as I was sitting in my room, the thought came to me: “Do your job. Write.” But I didn’t write. I wasted time on Facebook and God-knows-what-else. I’m pretty sure I ate more “Hint-o-Mint Newman-O’s” than is nutritionally advisable. I probably checked CNN.com once or twice to skim the surface of the world’s latest ills. I watched an episode of The Office. I went to bed late. I didn’t do my job.

I know this is my job – this writing thang. I can’t keep putting it off. Not because by not writing I am somehow depriving the world of profound insight (I am not) but because by not writing I am certainly depriving myself of insight. I need to do the work, and the work needs to do its own work in me.

Linford continues:

“Someone in our Santa Fe songwriting workshop once confessed –“I’m good at a lot of things that will kill me.” For those of us who write, there are always so many options that don’t involve the dilemma, the extravagance of the blank page. When we sit down to write, there’s never a guarantee that we’ll have anything to show for it that we can touch with our hands, or see with our own eyes. In fact, life is a lot cleaner and more manageable when I’m not writing.

Yes, I’ll just admit it. I’m a writer that all too often is more than happy to run from writing. But sooner or later I realize something is dying inside. And then I try to get back to work…

PS- Please pass this letter around freely to your friends and family. Chop it up and twitter it. Crumple it in your mind, strike an imaginary match and start a fire. Print it out, line the birdcage with it and let the white doves crap all night long. Spread it on the floor and train a puppy to squat and pee. Make a paper airplane out of it and toss it off the Golden Gate Bridge. Slip it between the pages of an old Southern Baptist hymnal, or into the yellow pages of a phone booth phone book if such a thing still exists. Maybe a writer will find it, God help her.”

Thanks, Linford. And God? Please help me.

I Wrote a Pirate Poem

I wish I were a pirate in the worst way today
In a boat upon the ocean, or out in Hudson Bay
Doing pirate daily chores, keeping watch for foreign shores
I wish I were a pirate in the worst way today.

I wish I were a pirate, though a girl one, not a boy
Swashbuckling and brave, yet I’d wear skirts and still be coy
Treated like a lady fair, pirate men would stop and stare
I wish I were a pirate, though a girl one, not a boy.

I wish I were a pirate, and not an office clerk
Trade my cube in for a tall ship; get serious about my work
Rise up through file and rank, by making bad guys walk the plank
I wish I were a pirate, and not an office clerk.

I wish I were a pirate, I’d be full of salty speech
Sing pirate songs each morning; eat my lunch upon the beach
Fulfill fiduciary duty (I’d be boss at hauling booty!)
I wish I were a pirate, I’d be full of salty speech.

I wish I were a pirate, ‘cause it sounds so fun and free
The world as your oyster, sailing ‘cross the seven seas.
No rent to pay or debt to owe, whiskey-drinking as we go,
I wish I were a pirate, ‘cause it sounds so fun to me.

Walk This Way

I’m fasting. From the media. From watching television, from reading your blog, and from checking CNN.com compulsively throughout the day. I’ve been at this fast for approximately 36 hours. I have approximately 125 hours left to go. But who’s counting, really?

This was not my chosen fast; rather, it came to me as a homework assignment for a writing class I’m taking. The task: deprive myself of input from the media for one whole week. The goal: to clear away distractions and focus more on my output – my own thoughts, my own writing. Sounds good in theory, right? We’ll see.

The thing is, I must admit, my teacher knows what she’s doing. This isn’t her first barbecue. She’s been teaching writing and creativity for over 20 years. When I heard that Julia Cameron would be offering a class on writing this summer, I signed up immediately - with scant attention paid to the actual course content. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to sit in a classroom with the Wise & Wonderful Julia. Also, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to brag to everyone I know that I was taking her class. (I’m kinda shameless that way.)

This was back in April or May, when the course’s July start date seemed years away. In the interlude between enrolling and attending, I muddled through daily life and struggled those struggles with writing that have become so constant and habitual that it’s hard to imagine life without them. What would it be like if I didn’t always procrastinate? What if I wasn’t so caught up in comparing myself to “real” (read: published & paid) writers? What if I stopped stressing about how I should be writing right now, how I’ve already wasted so much time, how I need to write something witty-amazing-brilliant immediately or all is lost and I might as well give up?

One night I remember sitting in my room, trying to have a Mondo Beyondo moment and focus less on the negative. I thought about what I wanted for myself, and decided that I really wanted to see myself enjoy writing. No pressure, no should-have’s, no notion of potential nor publication. Let’s let go of that, and just enjoy the act of putting words on a page.

All of a sudden, July showed up and it was time to go to class. I looked over the course description and purchased my required reading – The Right to Write. I started to have some doubts about this class. Was it really going to help me? It seemed too happy-clappy, too rah-rah, too basic. Didn’t I need serious teaching, serious help if I was going to become a serious real-deal writer?

Ah no, silly self. Remember how you don’t always know what you need? But God knows. And dare I say, it’s this class? So far it’s been challenging, as Julia has us writing, writing, and writing some more. An unrelenting putting of words on a page, with an emphasis on the messy process of writing, sans any pressure for a polished finished product. Some of our homework exercises have been fun, and guess what – I’ve enjoyed them! (maybe not this media fast particularly, but…)

I wanted to take a minute to recount all this in part to reaffirm for myself that God is working and that his timing is mad-crazy. I signed up for this class, with it’s emphasis on enjoying the writing process, long before I had the epiphany that what I really wanted to do was enjoy the writing process. So as I peer apprehensively at the future and wonder how it’s all going to work out for me, I remind myself that God is already working, already clearing paths and laying bricks for the road I will walk.

How To Tell You...?

About a year ago I decided that I should throw myself into awkward social situations whenever the opportunity arose, because as unpleasant as it might be, undoubtedly I would get good writing material out of it.

Such an opportunity arose yesterday and I took it, but now I'm having trouble figuring out how to write it for you. I mean...it was just so...bizarre. Part of the difficulty I'm having lies in scenary - I'm terrible at descriptions and the physical surroundings of yesterday's weirdness play a big part in the story. So this is a good writing challenge for me - I will work on a way to paint the scene for you, to take you with me into that crowded apartment, to let you experience what it feels like to be set-up at an octogenarian grass-roots peace activist meeting.

Dates and Pages

"My only ritual for writing is that I do it every morning. I wake up and get to work. If I’m in a motel in Mobile—so be it. If I am up all night, and morning is two o’clock in the afternoon, well, that’s okay too. The only thing that matters is that you write, write, write. It doesn’t have to be good writing. As a matter of fact, almost all first drafts are pretty bad. What matters is that you get down the words on the page or the screen..."

-Walter Mosley, from his book This Year You Write Your Novel

Came across this quote recently. It pretty much sums up my last post on writing, which pretty much just summed up the writing instructions of Stephen King and Anne Lamott, which is to say, the Nike approach to the craft: Just Do It. For a lazy procrastinator like me, this approach does not have quite the appeal of perhaps a "Just Think About It" approach. But the experts have spoken.

Anyhow. A friend recently introduced me to The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. We've been working through the book (it's broken into 12 week-long segments, with readings and assignments for you to complete each week.) The idea is to unblock your creativity and recover your inner artist. Or something. It may sound hokey, or self-helpy, but actually it's been interesting & helpful.

Cameron recommends (well, insists, really) that you take up two regular practices during your journey into unblocked creativity. One practice she terms "artist dates," which entail taking your little artist-self on a weekly date to some activity or place or space that will encourage you to start observing and sensing and experiencing. The end goal being that, from these experiences of life, art, and yourself, you become inspired to create. I had planned to take myself on a date to the Met last weekend, but I stood myself up. Perhaps this weekend...

I've been doing a little better with the second practice, "morning pages." Essentially this is just journaling; Cameron asks her readers to commit to writing 3 journal pages each morning. The content of the pages doesn't need to be profound - it should just be whatever is in your head and needs to come out (aka a "brain dump.") If you can't think of anything to write, you should write, "I can't think of anything to write" over and over until something else comes out.

I have been journaling for years, but I'm pretty sporadic at best. Mainly I journal out of necessity, when at a crossroads or crisis. Occassionally I journal when I need to pray, but am worried that I'll fall asleep if I just sit there praying quietly with my eyes closed. I put myself to much shame recently when I realized that it had taken me *2* years to fill out my latest journal. And it was not a thick book, people! No excuse for such spotty, sparse writing.

Armed with a pretty new journal (I really think it's the prettiest journal in the world and it makes me so happy just looking at it. "Here's looking at you, kid!" I tell it.) (No, I don't.) and the no-pressure approach of Cameron's daily "morning pages," I've been doing pretty well with this practice lately. I think that's a step in the write direction. (Oh no, I didn't just make that pun!) (Yes, I did.)

Write Like It's My Job

“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.” -Samuel Johnson, writer

Writing is hard. I forget this sometimes, figuring that if I were truly gifted or talented then writing would come easily, words should form seamlessly on the page, the whole process as easy and natural as walking. When in reality, I often sit down to write and find my mind choking on the ideas I want to express, so that the end result is a few mangled half-sentences which I pronounce “stupid” and….(not sure how to finish this sentence).

In these situations, I have to rely on the reassurance from published authors who swear (in their own books on the writing process) that it doesn’t always come easily for them either. Anne Lamott penned what is perhaps my favorite book about writing, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. In it, she devotes a whole chapter to the immensely helpful concept of “Shitty First Drafts.” Don’t think that all authors get it right on the first try, Lamott exhorts. We all have to start with a “shitty first draft” in order to just get it down on paper. Leave prettiness, refinery and perfection to be sought later on in the revision stage.

Stephen King’s On Writing is another good read. (I like to pretend that reading about writing is an acceptable procrastination for actually doing some writing.) King recounts an episode, early in his career, where he learned to get over the need for perfection and just write. Returning home one evening, King refused to let himself get distracted by the pile of dirty dishes and instead sat down at the typewriter (remember those?) and just wrote. When he had completed his allotted time of writing, he promptly trashed those typewritten pages. They were terrible. Drivel. But he didn’t let the quality of the prose bother him, because he had succeeded in doing his job. He sat down and wrote.

I try to keep that mindset: my job is not to turn out to perfection, but to just sit down and write. To that end, my friend Kelly and I have started to set aside the occasional evening to meet up at DTUT, collapse into their ugly-yet-comfortable orange arm chairs and write. The other night I started a story that was pretty miserable, a “shitty first draft” if ever there was one. But still I can congratulate myself (and I think Anne and Stephen would as well) on the simple act of showing up and doing my job.

Once Lost, Now Found

Found another bit of unfinished prose, buried in old emails. This one was started back in my "I'm going to be a children's author" phase:

James Abednego felt that his life had become like a snow globe. A once-peaceful snow globe that was violently-shaken, throwing up a blizzard of confusion. The first twelve years of his life had been so average, so comfortably average. Life had been moving along as planned, no bumps or bustles. Now he found himself far away from home, living in Boston with a woman he barely knew, and he had the sneaking suspicion he'd just inadvertantly joined a gang.

Q Q Q Q Q Q

My slow-moving, on-going project to go through & clean out old emails has turned up a few writing samples of mine from my temping days in 2002 (motto: when life was simple, yet boring). I had forgotten about most of these bits of poems and prose (and probably rightly so), but through the miracle of a little thing called Hotmail, they have been restored to me. Here's the start to a short story I never finished, about a boy named Quentin.

The impetus for the story was a challenge from my friend Kyle to write something using as many Q-words as possible. I believe the eventual intent was to turn Quentin's story into an allegory for the book of Ecclesiastes (also known as "Qoheleth"), but that never happened. And probably rightly so.

There once was a guy named Quentin. He was your Average Joe, except that his name was Quentin. Not Joe. Quentin lived in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he worked in a steel factory. He worked at the factory's snack bar, where he served french fries. Every Friday they had fish sandwiches. Quentin was in charge of the mayonaise supplies on Fridays. Steel workers love mayonaise on their fish sandwiches. Extra mayonaise packets cost a quarter.

One blustery, brisk autumn day, Quentin started on his mile-long walk to work. As the leaves swirled around his ankles, Quentin began to question the meaning of life. The meaning of his life, in particular. Was there meaning? Would anyone notice if he wasn't there? What should he do career-wise? Relationship-wise? Fashion-wise? In the midst of his quagmire, Quentin stumbled and fell into a septic tank.

Splash! "Well I'll be a monkey's uncle!" thought Quentin. He had never fallen into a septic tank before. He wondered (as perhaps you are wondering) why a septic tank would be laying open next to a sidewalk on a residential street. He splashed around for a bit, gathering his thoughts, and plotting his next course of action.

Suddenly he looked up into the sky, surprisingly blue and pristine above the funk-nasty brown muck that he was currently swimming in. A flock of quails (unusual in Scranton) flew overhead, and Quentin knew without a doubt that these quails were off to bigger and better things. "Fort Lauderdale, I reckon," reckoned Quentin.

Coffee as Muse

While cleaning out old emails, I came across a poem I wrote back in the dark days of temping, circa 2002:

Coffee #1

Eyelids weak, but coffee's strong

This afternoon drags on too long

Cup o' coffee, cream and sugar

Only thing that rhymes is "booger"

Contents Hot! And yes indeed.

Cup o' coffee gives me speed.

Files filed, letters written,
By the Caffeine Bug am bitten.

[That last phrase "am bitten" reminds me of the Dutch word "aanbidden" which means "adore." And I do adore coffee. Go figure.]

The Freaking End

My friend Juan says
Saying “freaking” isn’t very
Freaking lady-like, right?

And though I know better words
To surpass and suppress “freaking” still
It slips in to pepper my speech

At first imperceptible but soon
Too much pepper is present, eclipsing
Salt and grace in my conversation.

Juan drives the point home
again, with a pseudo-expletive-filled
email so I can freaking see for myself

‘Again’ because he did it once before
(this nasty habit hard to break)
But then we lived in the same city so

He scolded with every infraction
I uttered over lunch
Or maybe it was at Starbucks

Where I get scolded often, it seems
As last week an elderly woman & her latte took
a seat next to my friend and I, then

Took us to task for saying “like”
10 times in 1 minute, according to
her un-requested & quite unappreciated tally

Followed by a lecture on young people these days
And our terrible patterns of verbal sloppiness.
One could protest seniors’ pattern of interruption

But there is no salt and grace in that either. So
I bit my freaking tongue and again resolved to
Blot the blight of “freaking” from future speech.

(My thanks to Juan, Colossians 4:6, and like, that lady at Starbucks)

Ain't No Thing

When I was sitting there in the Hilton Theater last week, taking in "Hot Feet" - I thought to myself, with not a little hubris, "I could write a musical like this. How hard can it be? Just take a group of pre-existing songs, borrow a fable, combine, and voila!" I am not a very inventive-creative type person, but I can borrow/steal ideas like nobody's business. (Actually, that is somebody's business; namely, copyright lawyers.)

I have actually thought of 2 ideas for musicals in the past, the specifics of which I am not at liberty to disclose on this public forum. Let's just say Cher, salty sailors and tax evasion figure prominently. It's just a matter now of sitting down and ironing out the little details of the shows, such as dialogue and plot.

I have also, in the past, tried my hand at song-writing. I think the results were quite good, but I'll let you decide for yourself. The following is a song I wrote about a parasitic worm that briefly lived in a roommate's leg. (I should explain that the worm's nickname was "Fat Bastard" and that he liked bacon.) Read over the song, then let me know if you'd ever pay good money to come see a show I had written.

Ode to Fat Bastard:
You are a worm, a little worm
You live inside of me
I give, and you are takin'
And you're crazy for the bacon.

Chorus:
Fat Bastard, Fat Bastard
I met you in Belize
under the palm trees
I brought you back home
like some garden gnome
that went and bit me!

Fat Bastard I cannot catch you
You're too icky and small
I feel you when you're shakin'
Like you're crazy for the bacon.

Go on and get out of my leg
I don't want you no more
My love, you are forsaken
Cause you're crazy for the bacon.

(repeat chorus)