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Something to Say

Something to Say

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“People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes. I can
teach you how to write a
better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a
plot. But I can’t teach you how to have something to say,” says writer Ann Patchett, quoted in yesterday’s “Writer’s Almanac.”

Ahh, the ever elusive something to say. Seems self-evident, but of course is not.

Maybe the something to say is buried and must be excavated, shovel by shovel, until you hit pay dirt. Or hiding and must be tamed like a shy bird. Or blocked by a gate to which there is no key.

How many times have I sat with  fingers poised above a keyboard — or even with fingers flying only to realize 500 words later that these words are going nowhere.

“What do you want to say?” is the question.

Too often, I don’t have an answer.

Friendship Priming

Friendship Priming

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The newspaper clipping, neatly labeled “International Herald Tribune,” came from Kay in France. She had tucked the essay in with a note that said “this has ‘Anne’ written all over it.” 

The topic: structural priming, the unconscious influences on writing, how what we read settles into our brain and sets up shop there and, before we know it, we’re penning lines better suited to reports than poems. It’s a habit we can break by cleansing our “linguistic palate” — reading widely and “against type.”

The author, Michael Erard, has written short stories, essays, reviews and nonfiction books — but his day job is a think tank researcher. In other words, he says, “I’m a dancer who walks for a living.”  And he dances better, he says, if he shuts off the Web and dips into a page of Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style before beginning his creative work.

Reading this essay was like turning a kaleidoscope and bringing a new palette into place. It’s something I’ve thought about for years, but couldn’t have articulated.

And it’s worth noting that although I might have stumbled across the article online, it came to me because someone I love thought I would like it. Which makes it an example not of structural priming but of friendship priming, the uncanny and unconscious connections that exist, that flourish, between friends.

Missing Words

Missing Words

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Half an hour into Wednesday’s eight-hour drive I realized that I had left my journal behind.  It wasn’t the sort of item one turns around for, this notebook of half-baked ideas, first lines of poems, morning thoughts. But for the last two days I’ve felt its absence.

What I’ve missed is not just the potential, the blank pages waiting. I pressed my calendar into service on that errand right away, and now the odd week or two when I had no appointments, nothing in particular to remember, are covered with scrawl.

No, what I miss is the weight I carry with me, the journal as repository. It’s as if without the words I’ve written I’m not exactly me.

Before the Walk

Before the Walk

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Before the walk comes the poem, a verse or two to take along the path.

I see more clearly with downcast eyes, pondering a private line.

Words tilt the sky, straighten the trunk, unmask the liquid

line of the horizon.

There is still much more unnoticed than revealed.

Bucophilia

Bucophilia

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It’s still dark at 7 a.m., a cold inky blackness that does not invite exploration.  Leafless trees, downed branches littering the yard, a sky just light enough to promise hope.

It is a season that calls for poetry (as if all seasons didn’t). So I return from the library my arms full of Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, Maxine Kumin.

This morning, Kumin makes me smile:

Bucophilia, I call it —
nostalgia over a pastoral vista —
where for all I know the farmer
who owns it or rents it just told his
wife he’d kill her if she left him, and
she did and he did and now here come
the auctioneers, the serious bidders
and an ant-train of gawking onlookers.

Bucophilia — it’s a word I’ll take into the day.

“Realms of Gold”

“Realms of Gold”

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Today is Halloween and the birthday of the English poet John Keats, who described autumn as a “season of mist and mellow fruitfulness.”

After two stormy days that were much closer to Percy Shelley’s depiction of the season —”O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being” — I slip back into Keats’s quiet vision. Autumn as a time of reflection and poetry, of observation and even of revelation.

Here is my favorite Keats poem, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”:

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
  Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told          5
  That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne:
  Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
  When a new planet swims into his ken;   10
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
  He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
  Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Anniversary

Anniversary

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On October 12, 2004, I went to work as a writer/editor for a university alumni magazine, ending a 17-year freelance-only career. I can still recall the strangeness of that day, the sound of high heels on the hard floor as a designer dropped off page proofs for me to read, the lunch I shared with two new colleagues. I even remember the outfit I wore, which included sandals because I hadn’t yet gotten around to buying “work shoes.”

Though I’ve long since grown used to the routine, some days it still seems slightly surreal to trade sweatpants and slipper socks for a skirt and flats, to travel elsewhere to do what I do at home all the time anyway.  But the routine has enlarged me, has given me plenty to think and write about, has helped me feel closer to the place I live.

Writing will never be just a job to me. But for many of my waking hours these days, that’s exactly what it is.

Gift from the Sea

Gift from the Sea

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I spent the early morning hours (the fruits of insomnia) copying out passages from a book that must go back to the library today. It’s a posthumous collection of the letters and diaries of Anne Morrow Lindbergh called Against Wind and Tide.

I read the book before I went to the beach, and I was delighted to find in it the seeds of her Gift from the Sea, a favorite of mine that Against Wind and Tide prompted me to re-read. How illuminating to come across her original thoughts — thoughts she would later hone into the book that sold three million copies — on solitude, relationships and what it means to be a woman and a writer.

On that topic,  Lindbergh quotes a nineteenth-century writer who says that a woman writer is “rowing against wind and tide” — hence the title of this collection.

As I push against a steady current of my own, I’m happy to row for a few moments with Lindbergh’s words, words like these: “I feel a hunger now — a real hunger  — for letting the pool still itself and seeing the reflections. I feel a hunger for the kind of writing that I feel is truly mine: observation plus reflection.”

There were many passages like this one. My fingers are sore from typing them. But my mind is dancing with thoughts and images.

Leaf, Blossom, Bole

Leaf, Blossom, Bole

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The crepe myrtle blooms when other foliage withers. It adds springtime hues to a late-summer palate. It does all of this and more.

But only if you have sunlight to sustain it.

Our two crepe myrtles have decided this is not the case. So we have the leaves and in one case even the buds, but not the flowers.

But what is the essence of the plant?

For some reason I think of Yeats, who speaks of that and so much more:

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance? 

Paper Cut

Paper Cut

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Injuries incurred while meeting deadline:

Eye strain

Neck pain

Paper cut

Yeah, I know, the last one sounds silly. But, as I said to myself when I sliced my hand (and right on the life line, wouldn’t you know),  paper cuts don’t happen in a digital world. Carpal tunnel syndrome maybe, or some other repetitive stress injury, but not paper cuts.

They are, then, a dying malady. A problem that will (it’s safe to say) plague us less in the future.

Say what you will about the printed word, that it’s being eclipsed by tablets and smart phones and bottom-line bosses — it can still make us weep and make us bleed. At least for now, we continue to live in a tangible, touchable, tactile world.