On...imitation

And the class is divided. Half howl that imitation is somehow cheating and the other half cling to Sellers' idea of "scaffold" as if it were a liferaft - which I think it can be. They seemed happier with the idea of riffing off one line after another than with the "mad libs" idea of "fill in the blank."

After talking around the subject, I led into my in-class Kincaid exercise. Poems were born...about corgis and cutting, horses and problems with french pronunciation. I fielded questions about footnotes and foreign languages in poems. I think the exercise earned its place in the plan.

Feel free to imitate :) There's an link to an audio clip of Kincaid reading the poem on Links Out Loud.

Class Exercise #3: An Imitation of Kincaid's "Girl"

Kincaid’s piece presents two speakers (perhaps)—one handing out advice and the other listening and chiming in. A common experience. Take a moment to pick an instance from your life when you have either given or received advice. Now re-read Kincaid’s “Girl” (page 55) and get ready to write your own imitation.

Kincaid’s first “line” is “Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap;” An imitation on the general subject of “advice about choosing a dog” might be “Choose a dog that runs towards you and make sure you write down his name;” An imitation for a poem on the general subject of “buying groceries” might be “Bend the beans in half and see if they snap;”

End each line with a semi-colon and the poem with a question mark. Have the Kincaid open as you move through each line. Write fast. This is a practice draft. You’ll revise later in your own time. Here we go!

1. Write a command starting with a verb (i.e. Bend the beans to see if they snap;)
2. Write a command starting with the same verb (i.e. Bend the carrots to see if they’re old;)
3. A “don’t” command (i.e. Don’t let the man with the beard and apron see you do this;)
4. Command starting with a verb;
5. Command starting with a verb;
6. General advice;
7. Command starting with a verb;
8. Question about truth that includes a day of the week;
9. An “always” command;
10. Advice using the same day of the week;
11. Command using the same day of the week;
12. A “don’t” command.;
13. Response from speaker “B”;
14. “This is how to” line;
15. “This is how to” line using same verb as the previous line;
16. “This is how to” line using same verb as the previous two lines;
17. “This is how you” line using a new verb;
18. “This is how you” line using the same verb as the previous line;
19. “This is how you” line using a new verb;
20. “This is how you” line using the same verb as the previous line;
21. “This is how you” line using a new verb;
22. A “don’t” command;
23. “This is how to” line using a new verb;
24. “This is how to” using the same verb as the previous line;
25. italicized response from speaker “B”;
26. Question from speaker “A” that starts “You mean to say…?”;

Things to consider as you revise. Kincaid has high energy moments. Her advice about avoiding sluthood is an example. Another is the turn to blackbirds and spit. Try to incorporate some energy peaks in your own piece. Also, Kincaid tells us something we probably didn’t know – benna and duokona. Try to tell your reader something new in your own piece.

On...Expectations

So a friend of mine is teaching a half-semester freshman creative course, and she's asking her students to hand in a ten-page portfolio plus weekly responses to readings. And there's me walking into a 200-level course next week with a seven-page requirement and no response requirement.

How much is too much? Does a high weekly page count dilute the quality of those pages...or is a little stretching good for the writerly soul?

I think I'm going to stick to my page counts, but I am upping my in-class writing requirements to two per week. I enjoy thinking up the ten-minute exercise prompts and building them into a collection that fosters something...cohesive. It reminds me of how those huge frescos come into focus when we walk backwards. So my plan is to have the class, through a series of in-class mini write-a-thons, build families of usable characters and landscapes with both interior and exterior elements. And then to give those family members dilemas or desires. A case of personality, place, and problem.

Oh, and of course, to push myself to paint the same kind of fresco!

On...A Room of One's Own

So this is how it usually works. I know I need to be writing. So I do everything else that I can think of: I clean the bathroom, hoover the living room, wrap tape around my hands and “de-fur” the sofa. I even take the trash to the tip. When I’ve exhausted all my excuses, I take myself off to my tiny office off the kitchen, find some inoffensive classical on the radio, and begin to write. I get up for Triscuits and coffee, but I write until I have a first draft…or taste…of something. When I’ve finished, I’m back in love with writing and I have a nice clean house.

But what to do now? I’ve moved in with my man into his wonderful restored 19th century flour mill—all open plan and reclaimed wood—and my rituals are useless here. He’s a neat-freak, so there is no accumulated crap to distract myself with. His couch is tabby-coloured, so there are no scads of fur that need my attention. And the city pick up the trash on Fridays. Plus, I can’t find a place to actually write. The available perches are beautiful: a huge breakfast bar, a Danish modern 10-seater table, recliners galore, but none are as antiseptic and “closed off” as my old little office with its table’s legs pasted with Ginsberg poems and its top covered in rejection slips. It’s not “a room of my own.”

So, what to do? Bose headphones? Go and retrieve my old table and set myself up in the store-room next-door? Get up 5:00am and face the wall?

I hadn’t realized how wonderfully selfish my old solo life was for writing and for the rituals that I surrounded it with. I’ll have to work out a new way forward, new rituals, a new way to move into the writing.

On navigating

My thoughts in recent days have become terribly difficult to unravel. I seem to lurch from one extreme solution to the next; I am in something of a wilderness and it is much of my own making. When I play the bones of my predicament to friends, someone will always say, "You should write about this" but that has proved impossible. It is as if real life has to cool down a little before it can be turned out from its tin without damage, before I can "eat it" and benefit in any way not only as a writer but as a human being. The thought of using my present situation as material seems plain wrong. But I know that writing is my way through things. It is NOT therapy and I'm adament here. Therapy is hitting a tree with a baseball bat (thanks, Darcie) or eating ice-cream by the half-gallon with a teaspoon...or arranging crockery into sets and colors in second-hand stores.

But these times have to be caught if only to enable me to return here in the future and see the arc of this situation--to see its beginning and consider its wild trajectory.

While I was in MA, I came across a booklet called "Recovery Instructions" by Jim Weigang. He outlines, among other things, a principle called Early Morning Journaling. I began the practice in June while I was away and have continued it religiously ever since. It creates, for me, a kind of daily footprint in the sand of my thoughts. Without writing this down each morning, the footprints would be lost, sucked into my current life's quicksand. I hope Jim won't mind my outlining the principle here:

Grab coffee if that's what you need, but apart from that, wake up and take a notepad somewhere quiet, preferably outside or within sight of the outside. Take three deep breaths to quiet yourself and then try to let your mind open up to whatever thoughts come its way. Write down that thought and then let it go. Breathe, listen and then write the next thought. There is no requirement for connection here. In fact, disconnection is preferable. So, breathe, open your mind, write the thought, breathe, open your mind, write the thought...and so on.

I continue until I have filled a page in a subject notebook. Sometimes there are just one or two seemingly unrelated words on a line. Sometimes, a la Ginsberg, my thought runs across two or three lines. I follow Jim's advice and don't allow myself to rant or complain or to catalogue things I need to do that day.

Try it for a week or two. It's fixed now in my meditation and I can't imagine beginning a day without it. Some quotations cribbed from Jim's booklet that explain better than I am able the power of this process:

Of all strange and unaccountable things this journalizing is the strangest: Thoreau

and my favorite...from Kafka.

You do not need to leave the room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

My journalling won't solve the problems I find myself tangled in today, but I think I might learn something from it tomorrow.

On words

I'm reading Three Philosophical Poets by Santayana at the moment and have had to stop copying out marvellous quotes for fear of transcribing most of the book by hand. It's the kind of book I read with a good dictionary by my side. I hate to think I might be missing out on a gem because the terminology falls outside my narrow seam of understanding.

Today, I discovered "weal" as in "their judgements made their ... sense for impending weal or woe quite overpowering" (90).

Weal: happiness or well-being or prosperity.

At first, I was surprised given the destructive nature or history behind "weal" as in "welt," the mark of healed wound. But perhaps a healed wound is,in is own way, a mark of well-being.

Writing on...scrambling cliché

An early semester exercise is to spend some time writing really bad cliches. I chalk the following lines on the board and ask my Intro Creative Writing students to fill in the blanks with the expected words and phrases:

He was _________, dark, and handsome.
Beautiful ____________ _________________ hair.
The waves _____________ upon the _____________ beach.
The baby _______________ happily.
Her eyes shone like __________________.

We end up with something like this:

He was tall, dark, and handsome.
Beautiful, long blonde hair.
The waves crashed upon the sandy beach.
The baby cooed happily.
Her eyes shone like diamonds.

Then I ask them to fills the blanks again but this time with surprises:

He was dead, dark, and handsome.
Beautiful slashes of grey hair.
The waves sucked upon the bubbling beach.
The baby urinated happily.
Her eyes shone like dead roses.

This don't always work, but the exercise enourages students to break rules. We then take the words from the first set of blanks and switch them around.

He was long, dark, and handsome.
Beautiful, diamond-bright hair.
The waves cooed upon the tall beach.
The baby crashed happily.
Her eyes shone like sand.

All in the service of breaking up word packages. For the next week at least, they take chances with their writing. This risk taking sometimes wanes as the weeks go on, so the topic should be revisited several times. It's a good ice-breaker for those sessions where no-one wants to talk or write.

Writing on...Pattern

I like to think we had a good time in English 261 today. I'm using Heather Seller's text The Practice of Creative Writing because it works well with a sixteen week semester. She splits the book out into seven "tools" which allows me to teach/practice a tool (energy, form, insight, image...) for a week and then workshop student work featuring the use of that tool the following week.

Today was our second session on Pattern and we looked at Dinty Moore's cnf essay Son of Mr. Green Jeans: Alphabetically Arranged.

They read the essay as an assignment and then in class, we discuss the first six sections (A-F)and the connections that stitch them together. They then split out into pairs to discuss the pattern of connections between the remaining sections. The benefits of this exercise are two-fold: they always find new connections that have escaped me, and the opportunity to listen to their peers make connections opens up the essay for them.

However, at the beginning of class, before any discussion, I have them select three tiles from a Scrabble bag. The bag contains 26 tiles - A-Z. Then they write for five minutes on one of their letter tiles. The prompt for today's writing is An Essay on Studenthood: Alphabetically Arranged. After that first in-class writing session, we discuss Moore's letters A-F. Then they write on a second tile before they head off into their paired work. Finally they write on the third tile before we discuss their analysis of pattern in Moore's entire essay.

Towards the end of the session, they read their tile pieces out loud, in alphabetical order. A later assignment will be to polish these pieces and email them to me. I then collate the pieces and create a full collaborative alphabetical essay. I use this to kick off their end-of-semester readings.