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Writing as a Way of Being

Posted on by Ashley Warren

Flower

By Cara Chamberlain

From my desk, I look out the window on a rain-drenched green morning, on rolling clouds in a cornflower sky. The neighbor’s cat stalks through my “untamed meadow” native-plant experiment near the back fence. If I were a visual artist, I would, perhaps, make a little plein air pastel or watercolor of the scene. Since I lack those sorts of skills, I might attempt to translate the June yard (and my luck of having such a place, with all its fraught cultural and economic significance) into words. If I were writing poetry, I would also pay strict attention to the sounds of those words and how well those sounds recreated my sensual and emotional and moral response. After the writing, I would critique, revise, rewrite, and, perhaps, toss the whole effort as a waste of time. I would, in other words, fail. Or I might feel I had succeeded. I would read the poem to others or send it to a magazine (or several magazines). I might be somewhat proud of it.

Pressure to create, to leave an artifact for others: many writers feel this. Yet, I wonder. Something else besides a (possible) bit of writing on paper or screen has been gained by my poem-directed scrutiny, by my noticing the white cat lifting her feet as if in distaste of the sopping grasses. What if art is not a sort of industrial process with a product as its end result? What if art is a way of being, a practice, an enhancement of the senses and the powers of observation? What if art teaches something beyond words, images, sounds? What if art is an ethical way of life? What if we could escape the Romantic notion of a “great talent” gifting the waiting world with an epic, an image, a towering crescendo?

I think anyone can cultivate art as an ethical practice. In “Riprap,” Gary Snyder guides readers through his poem’s work-out: “Lay down these words,” he writes, “Before your mind like rocks.” Participate, he says, though not everyone can achieve the same stretches and balance. That’s to be expected. Some of us have stubborn joints and unhappy tendons. But the feeling of the stretch—everyone can experience that. In this time of reflection, isolation, and fear, I’m taking the writing (and reading) of poems as a challenge to participate in our shared words, and, as Browning says, “exceed my grasp.”

Cara Chamberlain

Cara Chamberlain received degrees in English and creative writing from the University of Utah (B.A.) and Purdue University (M.A.). She taught writing and literature for over 25 years in Wyoming, Maine, Canada, Florida, and Montana. Her poetry, essays, and short fiction have been published or are forthcoming in over 150 journals, including Boston Review, Tar River Poetry, Nimrod, The Southern Review, Passages North, and CutBank. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Hidden Things (FootHills Publishing, 2009), The Divine Botany (Word Poetry https://www.wordpoetrybooks.com/chamberlain.html, 2015),  and Lament of the Antichrist in a Secular World and Other Poems (Word Poetry https://www.wordpoetrybooks.com/chamberlain_antichrist.html, 2017). Her writing has been featured in Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. She has received three Pushcart Prize nominations. Currently, she works as a writer and freelance copy editor in Billings, MT.

What Is True, What Rings True

Posted on by Ashley Warren

By Bernard Quetchenbach

In my nonfiction writing classes, students often struggle with the nature of truth as it applies to their writing. How can one be sure about one’s own memory? To what extent should you research a topic when your impression of a thing, not the thing itself, is the subject of the essay?

A question of craft also sometimes comes up. Writers have obligations to different “constituencies,” not the least of which is the writing itself. What if an essay could be made better, for example, by tweaking one rendered scene to make it more clearly parallel to one that occurs later in the essay? Or what if your memory is incomplete, but there is one not unlikely element that would make the gist clear and resonant to readers?

I can think of an example from an essay I wrote many years ago about events that occurred decades previous to the writing. I wanted to describe the particular sense of being young and newly mobile. I wrote that I was “a teenager with new access to a car” or something to that effect. Actually, as soon occurred to me, I was probably in my early twenties. Ultimately I decided that the discrepancy was too insignificant to upend what I thought was an effective sentence rhythm.

Even years later, I’m not sure that that was okay. I’m pretty scrupulous when it comes to facts, and I know how to distinguish between what is and my reaction to it, at least insofar as any of us can do that. But in that one instance and, to be absolutely honest, in one or two others, I was unwilling to unravel what I thought, rightly or wrongly, was a downright poetic sentence.

In a way, I’m genuinely sorry. Nonfiction writing is as good a place as any to take a stand at a time when the whole idea of an objective reality beyond our prejudices and desires can seem hopelessly naive. But I can’t guarantee that I won’t make the same decision again if confronted with a low-stakes matter of remembered fact and a high-stakes matter of the music of words.

Bernard Quetchenbach

Bernard Quetchenbach’s most recent book is Accidental Gravity.  He is the author of poetry collections including The Hermit’s Place and Everything As It Happens. His poems, essays, and articles have appeared in a variety of books, journals, and anthologies; recent work can be found in Poems Across the Big Sky II ,Unearthing Paradise, Birdsong, and The Ecopoetry Anthology.

What If Your Resolution to Write More Doesn’t Work?

Posted on by Ashley Warren
Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

By Ashley Warren

For writers, resolutions can be starting points; this is the year you’ll write your novel or set to work on that collection of poems. If not a starting point, the New Year can be a marker on a work in progress. Resolutions become axiomatic—I will write 250 words a day. I will write 1,000 words a day. I will finish this manuscript in the next six months. 

You’d be hard pressed to find a writer that doesn’t exalt the value of putting your butt in the chair and words on the page in a frequent and regular manner (we even recommend it). But what happens if you put in the time, put down the words, send the work out, and nobody cares? 

I was a ballerina for thirteen years and went to college on a music scholarship. There are few better ways to learn discipline than through years of plies and/or scales. I carried my upbringing in discipline to my writing career—it got me through an MFA, a novel, and I landed a literary agent. But when we tried to sell my novel the journey stopped—none of the editors at the publishing houses my agent queried wanted my book. And a few short months later, my agent reorganized her client list and let me go. 

Discipline—my resolve to write and be published—arguably, didn’t work. 

Despite my best efforts, I spent the next two years fighting with what would best be called Writer’s Block. I put my butt in the chair, I set word counts, but I couldn’t bring myself to complete anything, or send out any work. When I reflected, it eventually became clear that my perseverance, in some ways, had been holding me back. One editor who rejected my book pinpointed this in her rejection note: “I thought this was a really interesting and well-told story, and all in all, I very much enjoyed it…[but] I felt there should be more to be able to point a finger to in order to resonate with an audience.”

Through discipline, I had learned to tell stories well, but that something was still missing. That something was heart. I had written a story that even I wasn’t 100% committed to.

When we get so focused on a goal, sometimes we forget the passion along the way. Looking back, that novel started as a homework assignment. It was a short story, and on someone’s suggestion, it became a novel. It wasn’t a story that was clawing to get out of me, it was a curiosity and I followed. 

Now, as the fog and emotional paralysis of Writer’s Block lifts, I find my approach has softened. We writers know that language is important, and so I’ve revised the words I use to talk about my writing. I’m no longer a disciplined writer. I’m dedicated. 

I’m dedicating myself to the notions that keep me up at night, the ideas and turns of phrase I thumb into the Notes app on my phone. If a project loses heart (or doesn’t have any), I save it to a folder on my laptop (the modern equivalent of “put it in a drawer”) and I move on. I’m dedicated to the craft of writing because I believe it’s important to encapsulate the human experience in words. That’s what I’m endeavoring toward. Not an outcome. And that brings my butt to the chair better than any New Year’s resolution could. 

Ashley K. Warren was raised in Missoula, MT, and began her artistic career as a ballerina and musician. She attended Concordia College on a music scholarship but found her creative home in the English department. She went on to receive her MFA in creative writing from University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program. Author of the poetry chapbook Today’s Body, she also writes fiction and nonfiction, and her work has appeared in various publications. When she’s not writing, Ashley teaches in the Free Verse Writing Project and works as a digital managing editor in radio.

How Reflection Can Serve Your Writing Practice

Posted on by Danell Jones
Log Cabin

By Tami Haaland

In recent years I’ve been deliberately exploring the process of reflection, how it can be useful both in terms of developing awareness and intention. When students submit work for a grade, I require a short reflective essay that discusses strengths and weaknesses in their writing along with their plans for the next stage of development.  Mind you, they have plenty of opportunities to receive feedback and make revisions before the grading comes along.

But this act of reflecting is something different. It requires that the writer deliberately think about how far they’ve come and where they would like to go.

In the past, I often incorporated a minimal version of reflection in my own practice—and I still do. It goes something like this. An issue will come to my attention and so I pose a question—how do I work with form in my poems? What makes a good ending? What would I like my line breaks to be?

That question, then, gets housed in the back of my head, the less conscious part of the mind, the “reptilian brain,” as Stanley Kunitz once said in a Chautauqua presentation, the place that poetry comes from. Here, I mull it over while I’m working on other things. That way my experiments and conscious efforts that address this concern find their way into my poetry.

Research shows that reflection helps us learn more effectively because it makes us more active participants in our learning. If you, your writing group or your circle of critical readers notice a pattern in your writing that may not be serving you well, then consider tracing the pattern, posing questions, or writing a short journal entry as a first step in addressing it.

***

Tami Haaland is the author of three poetry collections, What Does Not Return, When We Wake in the Night, and Breath in Every Room, winner of the Nicholas Roerich First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in many periodicals and anthologies, including, Ascent, Consequence, The American Journal of Poetry, The Ecopoetry Anthology, and Healing the Divide.  Her work has also been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, and The Slowdown. Haaland served as Montana’s Poet Laureate from 2013 to 2015 and has received a Governor’s Humanities Award, an Artist Innovation Award from Montana Arts Council, and writing residencies from Absoraka-Beartooth Wilderness Foundation and Provincetown Fine Arts Center. She is a professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Montana State University Billings.

Playing with Time

Posted on by Danell Jones

By Cara Chamberlain

               Writers play with time, moving forward from word to sentence to paragraph. Pages fill, and, hopefully, the end puts a stamp of closure on your effort. This linear motion turns ten pages into twenty years of a character’s life. One hundred pages speed from birth to death. Five hundred whip you along an inconceivable span—Nahguib Mahfouz wrote twelve generations into his tour de force The Harafish.

               Opposing the horizontal flow is a vertical axis. Hundreds of pages meander back and forth as a complex flashback “actually” occupies one fictional minute. In poetry, rhyme arrests us. Or repetition stalls us. Sometimes, symbolism lets an image, like a magnet, spin in place, accreting meaning and weight. Even grammar swirls us into eddies (think of the recursive sentence, “This is the cat that ate the mouse that lives in the house that Jack built”). A sonnet is a fourteen-line jewelry box of unchanging rhythms, rhymes, and glittering imagery. A novel is a larger sort of box, a container truck.

               Any word you write—“ghost,” say, or “father”—comes loaded with sediments from Old English, the King James Bible, horror films. You become historian, magician, archivist as you push your load of connotations into the future. Between stasis and linear motion, you may, if you’re lucky, find language pushing you into something language no longer contains. Standing free on the shore, you stop the flow of time and send it careening again.

               If all is going well, you write in an eternal present. When the inspiration peters out, you look up and four hours have flown. This temporal magic happens when you’re lucky, of course, but it can never happen if you don’t practice. It’s worth every ache and every setback.

Cara Chamberlain is a writer

and instructor for Big Sky Writing Workshops