pen ink river

In 1998, when I moved to Oregon, I knew I wanted the time to write but it can be easier said than done to move from the 9 to 5 to sitting in a house in the woods day in and day out, creating a "self-directed" life. So I spent several months going through Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way. While some of its "12-step" sensibility gets a little bit preachy (and thus on my nerves) I found many of the exercises and her suggestions such as morning pages and weekly artist dates most helpful.

In that book, Cameron suggests writing an Artist's Prayer, words that have meaning for you, that you can turn to, read, and re-read, for inspiration and re-inspiration whenever your stamina or desire to write falters. At the time the exercise sounded a bit corny--I'm not particularly religious and definitely not in the habit of praying --but I decided to try writing one anyway. Since 1998, I have written four prayers. They've evolved: in the beginning I wasn't even sure I had a voice of my own. Now, after years of showing up at the page, the keyboard, I need help with other struggles. Below is my "prayer" for 2005. If you'd like to see any of the others, let me know.

O Great Creator,

Now that the muse has handed me what undoubtedly is my subject, guide me and encourage me through all the tempests that will be part of seeing this project to the end. All signs from the universe are pointing to the fact that what I’ve borne witness to in my life is worth sharing with the world. Help me to have faith that I have everything I need already inside me and that it will come tumbling
out when I put my pen to paper, fingers to the keyboard, and that I will not only recognize it but know how to shape it when it does.

Allow me to believe and accept that the writing work is as simple as showing up every day with concrete goals, that this routine and discipline is the writing work. Forever remind me to find joy not only seriousness when I work with words. And help me to forgive myself when I stray, when I let disruptions derail and distract.

Give me the courage to reveal my self, my heart, my deepest truths—all that I’ve loved and love, lived and forgotten, found and lost. Remind me to regularly honor the knowledge that I am already well on my way to writing in my original and authentic voice. And that, in due time, I will release my work, with confidence and bravery, into the world.

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Finally, after more than three months, got a letter from Zachary Shuster Harmsworth, the literary agency based in NYC and Boston that had called back in February after learning of my Oregon Literary Fellowship and asked to see my work. Of course, they don't feel The Muse of Hanging is a fit for them. I knew that when the envelope was my SASE and not a larger, business envelope that might, oh joy of joys, include a contract. Still, a small crumb in what I don't think was a form letter:

"...we commend your literary fellowships and appreciated your sparsely, elegant, often dreamy prose."

So I guess they at least read it. Have I grown thick skin, is my lack of emotion part of being 49 or simply a Zen acceptance of the utter weirdness that is trying to make it as a literary writer these 21st century days? Truth to tell, I'm relieved to now know one way or another so I can keep working and work some of the other literary agent contacts I've got.

What a line of work to want to be in. Back to reading the new Harper's and an essay called: "Doing Time: My years in the creative-writing gulag" by Lynn Freed.

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We're edging into the solstice, the start of summer. These poems were written a couple years ago but my days this summer will likely be much the same:

Fog crowds the foothills—
August and an alien rain.
Log trucks hiss then dance.

Dawn’s pink blue rising
is a window shade pulled up,
clouds descending down.

Green metal lawn chairs
for studying the garden
breathe sap, exhale rust.

Dahlias drink in sunlight.
Hummingbirds flit by the
red begonia.

Ice in a puddle,
crumbs a slice of lunchtime on
a chipped yellow plate.

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What do you want a writing support group to do for you? What are you looking for? What are your top priorities for working with a group of writers—getting feedback on your work? having a place to vent? having a place to post what you are working on, what you're learning from other writers? Here's what I'd like a virtual writing group to be for me: -- A way to build community of like-minded souls with whom we can share our ideas, enthusiasm, and creative work. -- A site where we can share rough drafts and work-in-progress. -- A place where we can gather and give one another constructive feedback on our work. -- A way to build confidence about getting our words onto the page, and to offer ongoing encouragement in what can be a lonely, frustrating pursuit. -- A forum for sharing our confusions, lack of confidence, ups-and-downs, all the universally experienced pitfalls in trying to live a writing life. -- A way to check-in on a regular (weekly?) basis and report progress made on an idea, a project, etc. -- A place to share techniques and ideas about craft and process. -- An option for doing writing exercises together as a way to keep our motivation up. -- A place where we can post comments about reading we have done and what we learned from it that has been or will be helpful in our writing work. -- An ongoing place to celebrate our successes however we define them—anything from daily journal entries to having a piece accepted for publication.

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Travel really disrupts my writing routine. I know this and still head off to Northern Thailand for Songkran, to Kaua'i for a Bali Hai vacation with my husband, on a road trip to Boise, Idaho to eat a few nice meals, view art in the downtown streets and search, in vain, for fields of potatoes. It's been two solid months of distraction and upheaval thanks to running around the globe, living out of a suitcase. But now I'm back, ready to sit here at my desk, and dive in.

My ritual for getting back to work seems to go something like this:

-- Deal with the piles. Books that haven't been fit into their proper spot on the shelves. Piles of errant paper, everything from receipts I'm saving in case I make money writing this year and can deduct expenses from my taxes to interesting articles clipped from newspapers and magazine. Notebooks, notebooks, notebooks: does every writer have as many as I do. And then the bags -- I swear I've begun to use the totes handed out by everyone from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to Tin House last summer as a bizarre sort of filing system. If only I can remember which project is stashed in which one. So Monday was sorting and filing and re-arranging and finding the top of my cherry desk again.

-- Remember where I left off, whenever that was, wherever that was. What was I working on? What were the project priorities? Where did I think the memoir was headed next? I seem to need to re-group and review outlines and notes and topics I thought were next especially in the memoir project.

-- Clean up file folders. Make sure the words on the labels really reflect whatever is inside. This is a key organizational detail for me whenever I'm in the midst of a big project. I often forget how much work I've already done because I stuff the notes and print-outs and brainstorms in file folders and give them a cryptic label that means nothing to me even a week later when I try to figure out what I'm going to do next.

-- Review all I've done to date, my source material, etc. Even if this is just a cursory overview. It's a kind of taking stock to remind me of how much hard work I've already gotten done. BEFORE I disappeared to fly the friendly skies. Before I drove I-84 to look for some alternative America that included fields of potatoes.

-- Find one small project that's been hanging around forever to work on and finish that. I'm doing that with the poem I was writing, oddly enough, the days in May 2003 when it turned out G was killing himself. I remember being so happy to work on the poem that day, then I set it aside and it had languished through all the events and ups and downs of daily life since then. So today, I'm going to finish it and, at the very least, post it on this blog.

-- Start small on my bigger, longer project, which, right now is The Muse of Hanging. What Annie Lamott in Bird by Bird says to do is simply describe the one-inch picture in a frame. That's all you have to aim for on any given writing day. No more, no less. And in time the words will accumulate.

-- Keep my mornings free and clear, and most of my days to and for myself. My writing seems to flow better when I have these open stretches of time rather than minor, often self-induced disruptions like running errands that really can wait.

Posted by Nancy Flynn at 06:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Artist Date, Thursday, June 9, 2005:

Who would have thought that painting on clear sheets of Duralar acrylic that are then cut and secured into place with platforms of wood and small pins could be such an affecting sculptural installation? That, indeed, they are. Each of Katy Stone's three pieces in her exhibit "Fall" at the Boise Art Museum in Boise, Idaho seems to be an exploration of the word, fall, in its various meanings. A common enough English word—it denotes not only a season but hair and losing in war—she has taken words and teased out connotation in her visual work. The pieces are tall—I'm not good with height but they go floor to ceiling whicih must be 15 feet? One immediately evokes dripping blood, another strands of hair, and the third the flow of a waterfall. But wait, they do more than that. First off, in the listing of media used to create the work, Stone includes the words "cast shadow."

Each piece can be viewed from the front as well as the back, which is a mirror-image, shadow version of its frontal self. For me, the coolest part was what these pieces also DID. The sheets of painted Duralar acrylic plastic move—whether from fans blowing in the mysterious netherworld of the gallery's ceiling or from the rustle of air cause by a person -- me -- walking by, I can't say. And it may not matter. Because the movement causes the painted shapes to shift and the shadows to shift and the whole room to be alive with quiet, almost soundless motion. It's often hard to climb inside words and make them make shades of meaning; poetry may be the best example of our human efforts to try and do this. Katy Stone's installation at the Boise Art Museum felt at time like words in motion. Lovely, provocative yet tranquil and pleasing work.

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pen ink river is a web log for writers started by Nancy Flynn in 2005. Frustrated in her attempts to find a face-to-face group where she lives, she decided to embrace the virtual, to let a river of words flow from her fingertips instead of the ink of her fountain pen.

Think of it as the writers café you wish was down the street, dirt road, or stream. A place where writers can come together, a respite from our isolation, to share our work and solicit feedback. A library of inspiration to jump start your writing and remind you why you do this work in the first place. A place to post your thoughts and questions. Your worries and your doubts. What inspires you, what deflates you. Gossip and neuroses. Your rough drafts and your polished gems.

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