Writing Prompts and Bull Durham

Writing prompts interest me lately. In a recent writers workshop, I took down by hand, with pen on notebook paper the instructors list of 25 writing prompts. It seemed a small labor and a significant writers’ tool. This morning I entered “writing prompts” in the www.Google.com search window. In under ¾ of a second the first ten of 9,690,000 web entries related to writing prompts popped onto my computer screen.

Writing prompts didn’t just come into my consciousness. I’ve used them for years in teaching both elementary and secondary writing enrichment courses and in adult writers workshops I have fascilitated or attended. My recent interest was sparked by Karen Blomain, last winter when she related an idea another writing friend was using. He was having a significant birthday, 40 maybe. He made a list of 40 significant people in his life. His intention was to choose from the list each day as a stimulant for his writing.
I was stuck. I hadn’t written anything that wasn’t whiney for two months. As we walked along Basilio Badillo in Puerto Vallarta toward the beach, Karen offered the idea. I had been allowing the end of a large project and some emotional garbage in my life, including my upcoming 60th birthday to block my creativity. I thought a list of significant people was a great idea and announced to Karen that I was going to make a list of 60 individuals in honor of the big birthday.

I did start the list, but I have yet to write about one. It seems what I really needed was to be reminded that it’s a simple game to cite one of my favorite movies Bull Durham , “You throw the ball, you hit the ball, you, catch the ball.” Writing is a simple game. You put the tip of the pen on the paper and keep it moving. Just starting a list of possible subjects, knowing I would choose one and write about it each day was enough to get my pen moving, my imagination jumping.

Writing prompts, I know, are not written just to get our pens started. They serve to open areas of our psyche and connect them to our creativity in ways we might not otherwise have found. But, what about those nine million websites relating to writing prompts? Will it ever be necessary for another prompt to be written? Seems like the bases are covered.

Writers' Voices on September 11

With the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the U.S. looming, we can not help but reflect on how the events of that day impacted life in this country and most parts of the world. Our wounds still tender, it would be easy for the nation’s anger to be rekindled and or its malaise to fester anew as attention is refocused on that moment in our history. Yet, there have been many responses by writers around the world and particularly American writers that provide a salve for this still raw experience. This may be the perfect time to turn to those calm hopeful voices.

In September 11: American Writers Respond, an anthology edited by William Heyen, Etruscan Press, 2002, one-hundred and twenty-seven writers from diverse cultures within our country examine in one of several genres and a variety of perspective the events of September 11, 2001. Among those included in this anthology are the respected short story author and novelist John Updike, the equally respected writer and New Yorker Erica Jong, storyteller, poet, musician Joy Harjo, whose Oklahoma Muskogee roots and connection with the American Southwest provide a unique voice, and Karen Blomain, a university writing instructor, who has documented the lives of first and second generation families in the coal mining regions of Pennsylvania in poetry.

At the debut of the book in late 2002, a year following the events, reviewer Joe Lockard wrote “The difficulty of writing about September 11 will continue to be how we can avoid the simplicities agitprop, and ultra-patriotic banalities of official culture that demean its centrality in the politics of these days. Anthologies like this one are a start towards reclaiming the meanings of the event towards shaping a popular post-September 11 history.” September 11: American Writers Respond takes readers across the tapestry of American sub-cultures and forces us to see the impact the tragedy had on people other than the stereo-typical middle-class middle American, both within and without our borders. One of the clearest contributions in this vein is the essay "Sisters", by Karen Blomain.

In Blomain’s essay two sisters are spending a morning together shopping in a flea market when news of the attack begins to move through the booths and aisles. What setting is more universal in whatever century, by whatever name, market day, the souk, the bizarre, the mercado, the flea market? The American sisters come to understand the meaning of the tragedy and mourn along with Russian, Korean, Latino, and Middle Eastern people within the flea market. The reader experiences empathy and respect for all cultures and sees, through the pictures painted by the sisters' experience, beyond the events as an American tragedy to the world wide tragedy. As Bruce Bond writes in an essay included in this anthology, "The challenge of all politically charged art is for the authority of the work to reside not merely in the situation, charged as it is by ready-made pathos, but in the quality of spontaneous imaginative participation in that situation." Blomain skillfully helps the reader participate in the events with out the ineffective repetition of the morbid details. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her essay Sisters.

Karen Blomain, poet, novelist, essayist, educator has used writing to document her reaction to all the expected significant life experience, i.e. birth death, love, discovery, heartbreak, joy. Yet she just as skillfully touches universal topics and international events with the subtle hand of a poet and a life long observer. Her poetry, found in two published volumes, two chapbooks, and numerous anthologies and literary journals, runs the gamut from whimsical verse to deep observation. Most proud of her work with other writers, Blomain holds a MFA from Columbia and has taught in the Creative and Professional Writing Program at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania since 1990 and in workshops nationwide and globally. She will conduct a writers' workshop titled Personal Writings: Memoir and Poetry in Santa Fe, New Mexico September 15-17, 2006. For more information visit www.BelleCora.com or call 505/310-0703.

Obsolete Lessons in a Writer's Life

This morning I am writing with a view of my recently planted wild flower garden off the front patio. Morning birds sing. The locust are starting to buzz as this August day warms. My coffee mug, from a writers workshop I attended this summer atAnam Cara in West Cork, Ireland, sits to my left. It is in front of the printer connected to my laptop computer, but safely away from the exit line of the printed page. It's a lesson I learned hard and long ago and one of several in my writing life that is now obsolete.

I remember when I learned that paper quality was related to weight. Twenty-pound being the desired quality when submitting a manuscript. No erasable paper or onion skin accepted. I remember what a relief it was to have one of the new self-correcting typewriters. No more erasing or feeling around the edge of the typewriter for the typing eraser or looking under the notebook from which I was transcribing handwritten manuscript. No more discovering that the tiny bottle of correcting fluid was dry, just when I was about to snatch the last page from the machine and run breathlessly into the post office with my addressed Manila envelope at 4:58 pm. I remember discovering that dried out correcting fluid could be reactivated with water!

I remember my first typewriter with memory...It could retain about three lines of type, it could back up and correct exactly what you told it to. It had a line delay and could actually make a correction before the type went down, if you caught it in time. I remember when my neighbor, Ginger, who was married to a high tech kind of guy employed by what was then known as Sperry Univac, got a computer set up in her home. It took up one end of the living room. She allowed me to compose and print my weekly column for the Marine-on-St.Croix Messenger on it, saving me at least a couple of hours of frustrated time with my electric typewriter a week. When I made a typing error I only deleted the offending letter or letters. She counseled me that it was faster to eliminate the whole word or even the whole line. If I decided to change a word like more to or, I would only delete the m and the e. I just couldn't bring myself to waste...what? There was no more typing ribbon, no more white out solution, no more typing eraser. Somehow I couldn't get beyond the years of training and the concept of waste. I am still inclined to delete only the m and the e. I suspect that sometime in the future we, the human race, will discover that there is a limit to the capacity of cyber memory, like we discovered later rather than sooner that there is limit to potable water on the planet and a limit to how much polluted air our atmosphere can neutralize.
I remember sitting in my office/den/my husband's office/my husband's stereo center at four o'clock in the afternoon with wine in a one of a kind hand thrown coffee mug that Connie, another working from home Mom, had made. I had the big white stereo ear phones on and the volume on the Japanese made stereo tuner, which Mike had bought in Turkey in 1970, turned up as loud as it would go. The dial was set precisely to a spot between two local FM stations on the dial. I had learned that the white noise was just enough to allow me to concentrate on editing, while blocking out any disaster that might occur in the living room where my children and a half dozen neighborhood kids watched Sesame Street.
I remember the single most important lesson I ever learned as an at home Mom/freelance writer. I learned the lesson through the experience of my first electric typewriter. The electric return was powerful, fast and made me feel efficient and real, a real writer. The sleek machine had a carriage that was longer and lower than that on my manual typewriter. In fact, the top of the carriage was the exact height of my favorite coffee mug. It could hit an average mug solidly about an inch and half below the rim and tip the contents, whether coffee or red wine, onto neatly stacked manuscript pages with surprising speed. I went from productive real writer to a disaster sopping Mom in under 7 seconds more than once, until I learned to work with my coffee to my left.

Memoir Writing: Remembering Emotion

Gloria Ziolkowski called yesterday to say she enjoyed reading Still Life with Violin, a memoir I published with Inge Lokos last year. Still Life with Violin is about Inge's life with her husband,Stefan, a romantic story set in post World War II Europe and a story of the courage WWII women needed to move on and to allow romance in their lives.

When I signed the inside cover of Gloria's copy, I wrote "To old friends, they're the best." A silly, not very original inscription...but, hey, we were in the post-gorging haze of our semi-annual Schezuan Shrimp lunch at the Jade Cafe in Florence Colorado, where they feel compelled to cover their 10 inch diameter entree plates and I feel compelled to eat all. Later, thinking how unwriterly of me, how lazy my imagination with that inscription, but how unembarrassed I was because I meant it and because I've known Gloria so long that I can be lazy and unimaginative with her, I realized that she is not just an old friend.

I've known Gloria for 50 years this very week. She is my oldest girl friend. I knew her before we thought about having boobs or wearing lipstick, when we still played with paperdolls and ran to grandmother's houses after school for cookies. The first Pitzel I ever saw I consumed in her grandmother DeCarlo's kitchen, where she answered in English the questions Mrs. DeCarlo put to us in Italian.

Gloria's last name hasn't been Ziolkowski for at least 40 years, but that is hard for me to absorb. I remember how accomplished I felt when I learned to spell her last name, a name long and foreign to my ears! And it began with the last letter of the alphabet! We'd just moved from a San Antonio, Texas suburb to a small coal mining town in the Wet Mountains of Colorado, populated mostly by Polish and Italian families, when I met Gloria. Everything was foreign to me there. I was accustomed to the Southern Hispanic culture of Texas, where my father's family had thrived since before the battle of the Alamo. I could eat TexMex all day and pronounce any word you put in front of me in Spanish, though I probably didn't know what it meant. But these Polish and Italian names and words! And the food!

Remembering all I learned in the tiny town of Rockvale, Colorado fifty years ago, brings me to the current popularity in writers workshops and book publishing of memoir writing. The publishing industry is embracing not just the unusual adventurous life but that of the ordinary person told in memoir. As young adults the lives of others seem exotic, much more interesting than our own. Just now I am beginning to appreciate the rich texture of my own childhood and what that brings to my writing as a middle aged adult.

I've learned that it is not how exotic the locations or dramatic the experiences of a life that makes good memoir writing, but the honesty of the images. I've learned in working with people like Inge Lokos, developing their memoirs as a collaborator or a ghost writer, that it is not just the clarity of the image of an experience, but the clarity of the emotion that accompanied the experience and the courage to put that emotion on paper, that makes the story. We need detail, as much as can honestly be attached to an experience of time and place, but in memoir writing we also need the courage to revisit emotion and embed it in the image, as well, in order to compel the reader to turn the page to learn from and value that ordinary life. For information on writers workshops featuring memoir writing check out www.BelleCora.com/Workshops.html.

Last week over lunch, I realized that while I was eating my first pitzel in the early fall of 1956, it wasn't just the sound of Italian words coming to me, the shiny scrubbed linoleum floor, the steam and smell of bubbling sauce on the stove or the exotic licorice flavor of the thin, crisp cookie that was embedded in my memory. There was the exhileration of fear in my first visit to Mrs. DeCarlo's kitchen. Gloria is a caregiver. I guess she always was. I was reminded that I went with Gloria that first time to check up on her Grandmother because her Grandfather had been buried a few days previous.

My mother's sister had died the year before. My brothers and I never visited her in the hospital during her long illness, nor were we included in the funeral. We weren't to talk about it to our mother. She might cry. That was the extent of my experience with death. Now I had been invited by this smiling, energetic new friend to visit a woman in her kitchen who's husband was dead, as though it were not only a usual thing to do after school, but a responsibility. In the dialogue of my childhood such a visit was intruding, rude, not a child's place and certainly something I wouldn't be allowed if I asked first. Boy, oh boy, with my stomach flip flopping, I was in step with Gloria down the school hill, over Oak Creek, across the tracks. I wasn't going to miss an opportunity this scary. I'm going to have to beg Gloria to let me rewrite that incription.

Read about Still Life with Violin and a sneak peek of the first chapter on the BelleCora Press website. It can be ordered from BelleCora Press or from Amazon.com.

Writing, Sitting and Walking

Just discovered from the Natalie Goldberg website, which I mentioned in a previous post, that Natalie is giving what sounds like a fascinating workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico in mid-September. The title is compelling enough, The World Comes Home; The practice of Writing, Sitting and Walking. But, in addition, it is scheduled to be held at the beautiful Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe. Unfortunately, I will be writing furiously with Karen Blomain in Santa Fe at her writers workshop, Personal Writing; Memoir and Poetry, September 15-17. I am sure there will be more serenity at the Upaya Center. But that is for another time in my writing life. My muse needs Karen's capable prodding right now. Though, I know I will feel a tug toward the hills north of the Plaza that week-end. Writing, sitting and/or walking, whatever moves our hand across the paper or the keyboard...let's do it.

Memoir Writing & Reality T.V.

I started teaching a writers workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, about eight years ago, which I called Writing the Memoir. I'm still not sure why I felt inspired to develop that workshop. I had done some ghost writing recently for a couple of people who wanted to publish their version of their life's successes and failures, which probably helped lead me to the concept. It may have been that I saw a niche and needed some extra money. Certainly, there was a bevy of inspiring writing instructors in Santa Fe at the time competing for the aspiring writers attention, most with wonderful credentials and equally wonderful workshop ideas.
I remember that poet Joan Logghe was facilitating an on-going free workshop for people touched by AIDS called Writing from the Heart. I thought it a brilliant and generous concept. Also, I think there was a fair bit of buzz about journaling, journaling workshops, combining self-examination and creative writing, coming out of our decade plus with Natalie's Writing Down the Bones and following on the heels of the Artist's Way,which may have motivated me. At this point, you maybe thinking, ho-hum, this blog is about how sluggishly my memory is this morning, and that you would recommend I pop a gingko and get myself to the Santa Fe Baking Company for a shot of caffiene.
While the gingko and Santa Fe Baking Company caffeine couldn't hurt, I am actually puzzling this morning on how movements of thought develop universally and drop out of the collective consiousness on to unsuspecting individuals like myself. Knowledge grows on itself; ideas have a snowball effect. Nothing new there. Memoir and biography have been with us in literature at least since the Bible, right? But, it appears to me that interest in this genre has grown considerably in the last decade and the subject has become more and more the life of Everyman, rather than of extra-ordinary man or woman. Recently, I've become aware of a new term in the writing industry to cover, I guess, memoir,journaling, steam of consiousness and some forms of poetry...personal writing. The poet and novelist, Karen Blomain, uses it in her upcoming Santa Fe writers workshop title Personal Writing; Memoir and Poetry. I like the term. I think it is inclusive and gives everyman the comfort zone he or she may need to bring out the writer within. However, I can't help wondering what our apparent growing interest in memoir writing means to fiction.
"Truth is stranger than fiction," it is said and we seem to be living more and more in a world focused on the strange, the bizzare for entertainment. Take prime-time television. There are actually week-nights in some areas, when the only scheduled situation comedies or dramas are re-runs. Have fictionalized versions of the life of everyman become too tame for entertainment? What we seem to appreciate collectively is the bizarre as demonstrated through reality television and the ordinary man or woman, willing to do anything for that 5 minutes of fame. Where does that leave literature...has literature always been just memoir in sheep's clothing? Was Everyman, the 15th Century morality play we slogged through in English Literature 101, really a memoir?

Writers Workshop in Santa Fe

I'm looking forward to an inspiring writing workshop with Karen Blomain in Santa Fe in September. Poetry and Personal Writings is the title of this three day, over a week-end workshop sponsored by BelleCora Press & Workshops, September 15-17. Karen, like many women, came to a writing career a bit later in life, after the kids were in school, etc. That doesn't, of course, mean she came to writing later in life...I believe there's a writer in most of us the day we leave the womb, just waiting for the skills and the opportunity to put our words and observances out there for the world to share.

Karen's writing is thoughtful, honest,sometimes humorous and often surprising. Her poem "Old Broads" is an example. You can read it and learn more about Karen's writing and teaching career at www.BelleCora.com/Writers.html

I've had a couple of workshops with Karen, most recently at AnamCara in Ireland. Her style of teaching/facilitating is warm, accepting, nourishing and, at vital points, challenging. She doesn't allow anyone to sit around and wait for that previously mentioned opportunity. I hear there are still a couple of seats left in Santa Fe. For more info on this workshop go to the Workshops page of the BelleCora website. Write on!