Living Among the Glories
- At June 26, 2023
- By Write in Community
- In Blog
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We are what we eat, the old saying goes, and this is true, in that what we feed our bodies affects who we become as physical beings. Similarly, who we become spiritually and emotionally is influenced by what we feed our souls. As does nature.
As a people, we evolved living in nature. We wandered the plains, tended plants and animals that shared the world with us, woke to majestic sunrises and watched in awe as the heavenly bodies crossed the skies. How did this all come to pass, we wondered. We flourished, breathing deep of the rhythms of the earth.
Read More»Writing From the White-Hot Center
- At January 30, 2023
- By Write in Community
- In Blog
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This last year I discovered a new writer that I love, the novelist, Lily King. In an essay in the back of one her novels, she tells about doing a reading at an Ivy League college in which, during the Q and A afterwards, she was asked “what factors determine your authorial distance from the narrator?” She responded that “I don’t think when I write. I am like a blind worm on the ground.” I love that! “A blind worm on the ground.”
She goes on to relate how she loves English literature classes and has been an English teacher herself. How she’s discussed and taken great interest in English-teachery things such as themes and yes, authorial distance. But that when she writes, she doesn’t use her “English teacher brain.” Not in the first draft of writing, “What you need,” she writes, “all you need, is your creative, sensual, wide-open brain.”
Read More»Want to Consider Collaboration?
- At July 25, 2022
- By Write in Community
- In Blog
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Ever think about collaborating with another writer or artist on a creative project? Wonder how it works? Bryan Collins, host of the “Become a Writer Today” Podcast recently interviewed Becky and me about our collaboration on our two books, Writing in Community and The Fire Inside. We had an intriguing conversation which provided an opportunity for us to think more about collaboration, how it worked successfully for us, and how a collaborative partner can help you to accomplish more–and better!
You may want to know:
How does the collaborative process work?
What are the advantages?
How do you find a collaborative partner?
You can listen to the interview (or view the transcript of it) here.
For more inspiration, check out our website www.thewritingandcreativelife.com.
Or follow this link to purchase our latest book, The Fire Inside.
Blue Horses: Saying the Unsayable
- At May 23, 2022
- By Write in Community
- In Blog
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One Christmas I received as a gift the Mary Oliver book, Blue Horses, and was absolutely blown away by it. First of all because of Mary Oliver’s writing which I’ve admired for ages, and secondly, because of the book cover. This features a painting of four horses, their forms rounded and graceful, all looking to the left as if something interesting is there. A fox or a dog returning their gaze, perhaps, or a person. The horses are beautiful and blue, the background in shades of yellow, spangled with stars, as are the horses themselves, their heads and bodies starry. So whether the horses are of the earth or the heavens, we are not sure.
Franz Marc
The painting is by Franz Marc, an expressionist painter and part of the “Blue Riders” group of artists in Germany in the early 1900’s. Marc was talented and influential, but his career was cut short after serving in the army in World War I. In 1916, flying shrapnel struck him in the temple and he was killed instantly. He was just 36 years old.
Why “Sense of Place” Matters: In Writing and in Life
- At March 22, 2021
- By Write in Community
- In Blog
12
Sense of Place in Writing
For as long as I can remember, I have felt a connection with the landscape, and believe that a sense of place matters a great deal—both in life and in writing. We live out our lives against a backdrop of mountains or deserts, the prairie, city streets, or the ocean, often in various combinations of these settings.
And this affects us. It has an important impact in developing our character–how we perceive the world, how we perceive ourselves. So it is that, coming from our particular backgrounds as we do, when we write, we do so out of that background--whether our story takes place on the plains of Nebraska in the 1950’s or the Russian steppes of Tolstoy’s time.
In addition, of course, writing with a strong sense of a story’s setting provides the potential for readers to experience a place they may not have been before. Reading Wuthering Heights, we find ourselves in the Yorkshire moors of the 1700’s. Melville lets us experience the “sweet mystery” of the sea, and its “gentle awful stirrings.” We, too, can offer this experience to our readers, whether we write of life in the small town we came from, or the rocky coast of Oregon which we’ve only read about.
Most importantly, a powerful sense of place makes our writing come alive. Our characters fall into and out of love, make terrible mistakes, suffer, and find joy again—in a particular place. This is enormously significant in good writing. Place helps to make our characters who they are, just as it makes us who we are.
Sense of Place for Me
I grew up in rural Nebraska, and lived on four different farms our family rented until buying our “home place” when I was fifteen. And I attended three different country schools. Going to school meant walking down gravel roads with my sister, the two of us walking a straight road from north to south, then from east to west, hills and fields stretching out endlessly on either side, the sky enormous above.
It meant living in a place with few trees and few people, walking past deserted farmhouses and wondering who might have once lived there. What does it mean to grow up in a place like this? To live out your life? Does the enormity of the landscape foster feelings of insignificance? Or does it do the opposite? And when you can look out over the sweep of prairie, able to see long distances, what does this do to your view of the world? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I believe it does have an effect, most likely in different ways for different people.
It might mean basking in the place you live, enchanted with its particularities and its delights. It might mean railing against them. Often it is a complicated combination of the two. Whatever it means for you, a sense of place is vitally important. Important to you and to your art.
“The sense of place is as essential to good and honest writing as a logical mind;” Eudora Welty wrote, “surely they are somewhat related. It is by knowing where you stand that you are able to judge where you are.”
–Lucy Adkins
Writing Exercise:
When we first meet and start to get to know other people, one of the first questions we ask is where are you from. Where are you from? Read the poem “Where I’m From” by George Ella Lyon.
Think about the landscape you are from—is it plains and big sky? A small town nearly hidden in a forest of oak and pine? Maybe you are from sidewalks and buildings that tower, maybe from sultry afternoons and leaf peepers crying at night.
Now consider what your parents did for a living. Maybe they are from Clorox and clothespins like George Ella Lyon’s people. Maybe from pocket protectors and lines of numbers without end. Think about the smells you smelled as a child, the food you ate. The fears that occupied your thoughts at night .
Now, write, beginning “I’m from….” And see where your writing goes.
For more information about the writing and creative life, and our book, Writing in Community, see thewritingandcreativelife.com
Lookin’ for Love: In All the Wrong Places
- At February 08, 2021
- By Write in Community
- In Blog
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[Love] is art’s most powerful and enduring muse, fuel for the creative process, more potent than anything the world has known. –Maria Popova
Priming the pump.
Songwriter Johnny Lee and I have something in common– I [am] lookin’ for love in all the wrong places. For if love is the most powerful muse, why is a blank page staring back at me? So, where is the love? Then I remember, and the exhilarating joy of looking, unfolding, breathing in begins… Which image or stunning poetic lines are going to inspire me, lead me down the tortuously sweet path of flowing blue on my pages, into the mad scramble of fingers on the keyboard? In to love?
Books to Inspire Your Best Writing
- At January 18, 2021
- By Write in Community
- In Blog
11
With the new year, one of your resolutions may be to get to your writing desk more often, and write faster and better, and more! If you’re like me, it helps if you have a little inspiration to get going. I believe in reading as preparation for writing, and want to share with you some of my favorite books for getting the writerly juices flowing.
Read More»Kindness in the Time of Quarantine
- At April 20, 2020
- By Write in Community
- In Blog
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Unexpected kindness is the most powerful, least costly, and most underrated agent of human change.—Bob Kerrey
Lately, I have been thinking about “Kindness,” the moving poem written by Naomi Shihab Nye and published in 1995. “Before you know kindness,” she wrote, “you must lose things…” For this is a time when we as a world and we as individual people are going through loss. For some, it is deep heart-wrenching loss when a loved one passes away. For most of us, it is loss experienced in other ways–loss of financial security and loss of freedom of movement, loss of the loving contact of friends and family, the solace that comes from talking things over.
Read More»Animal Power
- At February 12, 2018
- By Write in Community
- In Blog
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Neil Gaiman said, “Any story is about a host of things. It is about the author; it is about the world the author sees and deals with and lives in; it is about the words chosen and the way those words are deployed; it is about the story itself and what happens in the story; it is about the people in the story…”
When you read author Garth Stein’s book title, The Art of Racing in the Rain, you may wonder what the story is about. According to Stein, “The story is about love, unconditional love.” He talks about how a certain dog, Enzo, uses his animal power to form a lasting community with his people family. Enzo tells the story from his perspective and helps family members work through major crises. Extensive television watching and paying attention to his master, Denny Swift, grooms Enzo to be able to offer constructive advice and emerge as a hero.
Read More»The Heart of Who We Are
- At May 22, 2017
- By Write in Community
- In Blog
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“Painting is damned difficult—you always think you’ve got it, but then you haven’t.”—Paul Cezanne
What is it we are “about” when we write? When we paint or produce a play? What are we after? Is it a certain feeling or mood, an emotional response? Maybe like the impressionist painters, it involves a specific goal—such as capturing the play of sunlight and shadow, accurately portraying the luminosity of light on water. Maybe, like Cezanne, the goal is to paint an apple that is both the essence of apple. and also an apple with such form and solidity that you could almost extend your hand and pluck it from the canvas.
Read More»
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