I am nostalgic for my attention

 "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. It is given to very few minds to notice that things and beings exist. Since my childhood I have not wanted anything else but to receive the complete revelation of this before dying." - Simone Weil

I feel nostalgia for my attention. For the last generation that grew up without internet in their childhood. A childhood in which I could truly leave school when I left school. I could come home to be a girl feeding her chickens and taking her rabbit for a leashed walk in the backyard.

I'm reading a beautifully printed edition of essays by Willa Cather. She titled the collection Not Under Forty (1936 Knopf) because she believed no one under 40 would be interested in these subjects.  The essays are character sketches and impressions of fascinating people she meets visiting friends in France and Boston, in 1870 1905 1915 1922, in hotels and at farms and homes.She runs into the niece of Gustave Flaubert in a hotel lobby (somehow people used to move into hotels back then for extended stays) and spent evenings talking with this Frenchwoman in her 80's.  When they weren't attending operas, the woman shared with Cather her memories of Turgeniev offering his edits of her personal translations of Faust. Imagine spending your time sharing memories with new friends and reading and translating for the fun of it!

People had time for each other. Reading Cather's essays, I feel I'm leap frogging back in time many generations following the thread of writer ancestries, writer influencers. It's a relay of time.

It's been a quiet week for me because I was sick with a gastroenteritis virus that hit me hard. I cancelled all my nightly networking events and classes. Less distractions, no coffee. I get a sense of Willa Cather in her essays, how she perceives and what stands out to her in her circle of the world. Even she has nostalgia for the quieter life before the war. WW1, for her. She writes, "Just how did this change come about, one wonders...Was it at the Marne? At Versailles, when a new geography was being made on paper?" (74)

In 1928, Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own wrote about a similar sensation of feeling a difference in the world after the war, that something was missing now in a gathering of people over food and literary topics of conversation. She wrote of a certain unconscious "hum" beneath the dialogue and conversations of people sharing ideas. That something was missing from the shine even of ideas that existed before the war, and shared now, they just didn't hum or shine as they used to, even if they were not any way changed from before.  Listening at a dinner party, Woolf writes, 

"Nothing was changed; nothing was different save only - here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said, but to the murmur or current behind it. Yes, that was it - the change was there. Before the war at a luncheon party like this people would have said precisely the same things but they would have sounded differently, because in those days there were accompanied by a sort of humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves."(12)

Can it be that the change in experience of the world around them in those times was of the magnitude in their experience as the increase of noise and chaos experienced by so many of us today? We find ourselves desperate to shield ourselves from the overload of information coming at us from all directions, much of it crucial knowledge for living an ethical life. Much of it misconstrued and swiss-cheesed with  cognitive biases. 

I am trying to manage my intake of information so that I can live intellectually and creatively, finding a community of fellow revelers of words and discovery and science and wonder and magic in this world. Also in order to live with an ethics that prioritizes the well-being of all of the beings, living and inanimate, that depend on an interconnectedness for survival.

I am also nostalgic for a world where I used to live in which the accosting nature of the internet was not interrupting my absolute attention to presence in human nature, each time and place.

 

Finding Inspiration in a Creative Community

By the time Scott Green introduced our first poet to the mic last Friday night (Oct. 11), I estimated about 80 people or more crowded into the sparkly Tahoe Wine Collective wine bar in Tahoe City. Scott was our MC for Poetry and Prose, the open mic event opening the Tahoe Literary Festival. This new festival is the brilliant brainchild of Katherine Hill of Tahoe Guide and Priya Hutner of The Seasoned Sage. 

The wine bar crowd tingled with the good will of friends gathering to celebrate creativity and to revel in the humanness that is our connection. I greeted old writing friends joining from Marin, Carson City, Reno and Tahoe, as well as met new writer friends from all over. The mingling creative energies filled my reservoir to motivate new work, and to keep on writing. 

I find inspiration from engaging with other artists and watching them share their inspirations. In fact, this is why I created the Monday Night Creative Writing Workshop series back in 2008. 

I invite writers to gather for 6 Monday nights to explore writing craft and write new work with unique prompts. The next series begins October 28th and runs for 6 weeks through December 2. This workshop series is for all genres, (fiction, memoir, poetry, and anything else) and all levels of experience in writing. it can be especially productive for artists who want to cross over from other mediums.

Monday Night Creative Writing Workshop Series Hybrid (online and in person)

October 28- December 2

Monday nights 6:30 - 8 pm

$180

Reach out to me by email or phone to sign up. We meet in person as well as online so you can join from anywhere.

Writing about Journey: from the Writing Wednesday Workshop at the Truckee Library 9/18

“It is simply that what happens in the writer happens in the reader” – Jane Hirshfield

Make a list of journeys you have taken in your life. From where to where? What about internal journeys? What do you remember most? 

Now choose one journey of yours to focus on to write about. 

Prompt 1: What did you not know before the trip?Was there a certain tension that you felt? What were your secret fears and secret sins?  Why did you need to go on this journey? Did you do something you weren’t supposed to do? What did you risk? What was a scene that stands out to you?

You may have tried writing about this journey or others before. And asked yourself, but how can  I get this story on the page in a way that helps the reader feel what I was feeling? How can I structure and craft my sentences, images, and scenes in a way that helps the reader experience the same thing I did?

I turn to Toni Morrison often, and especially this essay The Site of Memory she wrote about how her mind works as she is crafting her stories. She reveals a process of moving from the picture she has in her mind, in this case cobs of corn, through the memories and their emotional power, to the text on the page in her book Beloved.

Here is an excerpt:

“What I want to do in this talk is to track an image from picture to meaning to text - a journey which appears in the novel that I'm writing now, which is called Beloved. I'm trying to write a particular kind of scene, and I see corn on the cob. To "see" corn on the cob doesn't mean that it suddenly hovers; it only means that it keeps coming back. And in trying to figure out "What is all this corn doing?" I discover what it is doing. I see the house where I grew up in Lorain, Ohio. My parents had a garden some distance away from our house, and they didn't welcome me and my sister there, when we were young, because we were not able to distinguish between the things that they wanted to grow and the things that they didn't, so we were not able to hoe, or weed, until much later. I see them walking, together, away from me. I'm looking at their backs and what they're carrying in their arms: their tools, and maybe a peck basket. Sometimes when they walk away from me they hold hands, and they go to this other place in the garden. They have to cross some railroad tracks to get there.

I also am aware that my mother and father sleep at odd hours because my father works many jobs and works at night. And these naps are times of pleasure for me and my sister because nobody's giving us chores, or telling us what to do, or nagging us in any way. In addition to which, there is some feeling of pleasure in them that I'm only vaguely aware of. They're very rested when they take these naps. And later on in the summer we have an opportunity to eat corn, which is the one plant that I can distinguish from the others, and which is the harvest that I like the best; the others are the food that no child likes - the collards, the okra, the strong, violent vegetables that I would give a great deal for now. But I do like the corn because it's sweet, and because we all sit down to eat it, and it's finger food, and it's hot, and it's even good cold, and there are neighbors in, and there are uncles in, and it's easy, and it's nice. The picture of the corn and the nimbus of emotion surrounding it became a powerful one in the manuscript I'm now completing.

Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to render the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage. The process by which this is accomplished is endlessly fascinating to me.” - from The Site of Memory by Toni Morrison

Prompt 2:   Now we are going to add the concrete literal images and pictures from this journey.  Explore the images and associations connected to the journey in your mind. Let your mind wander and write as many associations with the images as possible. Let your mind digress and tangent.

Happy writing!

 

Embrace the Night Sky: 6 Prompts for writing about the stars

 “And I thought that, like the Earth and Moon and all the planets, perhaps every one of us is ancient and full of unknowable history. look up at the sky, or out across the earth, and you can be swept away by glorious flights of the imagination, and the humbling realization that in the true scheme of creation, all the many things we know amounted to almost nothing at all.” – Tracy K Smith

A Clear Midnight by Walt Whitman (1892)

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson
done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the
themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.

 

Artificial lights have become such common nighttime fixtures that we take them for granted. But what do brighter nights mean for people and wildlife? The effects of light pollution go beyond our diminishing view of the stars, but the solutions can have an immediate impact. 

This summer the Truckee Cultural District was honored to be asked by the Town of Truckee to be a part of Truckee’s first-ever “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” photo contest with opening reception held Friday, July 26th. More than 50 people attended celebrating photo contest winners in 3 categories awarded by Truckee Town Council members. 

The night-time photography competition received an impressive number of submissions, and was launched earlier this year to encourage residents and visitors to limit light pollution and enjoy the natural beauty of the night sky as part of the Dark Skies movement.

“We were so impressed by the number and variety of submissions from our community. The stunning images highlight a variety of photographic and lighting techniques while showcasing the natural and cultural places iconic to Nevada County,” said Heather Heckler, GVNC Cultural DistrictProgram Manager and administrator of the contest.

You can visit the art gallery at the Truckee airport to view Truckee’s Dark Skies show as part of the TTAD “Art at the Airport”.

One of the best spots for dark skies observations by the naked eye is Southern Sierra Nevada High Country. There are wonderful dark skies along the whole spine of the Southern Sierra from Mono Hot Springs down to Kennedy Meadows. That's the Kennedy Meadows on the Kern River, not the one near Sonora Pass, though that one's not half bad either.

March Moon by Langston Hughes (1926)

The moon is naked.
The wind has undressed the moon.
The wind has blown all the cloud-garments
Off the body of the moon
And now she’s naked,
Stark naked.

But why don’t you blush,
O shameless moon?
Don’t you know
It isn’t nice to be naked?

 

Sarah Howe, talking about how she wrote the poem Relativity below:

Science relies on metaphor—traditionally the poet’s tool—to describe and communicate itself. This was a recurring theme of my chats with scientific colleagues, who in their teaching come up with analogies to explain complex ideas for their students or phenomena taking place at a level we can’t see. They were conscious, too, of how these metaphors can mislead, making the known and the unknown seem more alike than they really are. I wanted to explore that tension in “Relativity,” whose title points to Einstein’s celebrated theory of 1915, a hundred years old this year. For me, relativity also suggests the relationship between two things in a comparison—the ligature of the word like, which chimes through my poem—whose interplay enables us to think. – Sarah Howe, The Paris Review

Relativity

for Stephen Hawking

When we wake up brushed by panic in the dark
our pupils grope for the shape of things we know.

Photons loosed from slits like greyhounds at the track
reveal light’s doubleness in their cast shadows

that stripe a dimmed lab’s wall—particles no more—
and with a wave bid all certainties goodbye.

For what’s sure in a universe that dopplers
away like a siren’s midnight cry? They say

a flash seen from on and off a hurtling train
will explain why time dilates like a perfect

afternoon; predicts black holes where parallel lines
will meet, whose stark horizon even starlight,

bent in its tracks, can’t resist. If we can think
this far, might not our eyes adjust to the dark?

 

 Prompts:

• Choose one poem from this post and begin by describing how this poem is being scientific or illustrating a type of space.  How could you use this similar method in your own poem?

• Choose a poem’s approach to considering science – a list, a naming, a playful riff on language and sound, a comparison or metaphor, a personification, a close observation – and model after it in you own poem. Begin by describing how could you use this similar method in your own poem?

• One way to begin is to choose a simple object/subject (Grass) or (Bird) or (Erosion) or (Mask) or (Hug) and begin with close observation and description. As you write, become more and more specific.

• Write about a constellation or a planet of another celestial object that you have studied or observed over many times and from many places over many times in your life. How many of the moments can you capture, one sentence or  two for each time  and place and memory?

• From A Poet’s Glossary by Edward Hirsch:“The letter poem is addressed to a specific person and written from a specific place, which locates it in time and space. It imitates the colloquial familiarity of a letter, though sometimes in elaborate forms. But unlike an actual letter, the letter poem is never addressed to just its recipient; it is always meant to be overheard by a third person, a future reader.” Write a letter to the moon, the sun, the solar system. What can you ask it that you cannot ask of anyone else?

• Write one sentence for each memory of sleeping outside under the stars or looking up at a night sky

 

 

What can science bring to a poem? Three prompts from the Truckee Library workshop series

 

When I asked the workshop participants last Wednesday evening what are some words that come to mind when they hear the word science, they came up with words like observation and questions. With the word poetry, they associated emotions and meditation. Some words were listed under both poetry and science, such as truth and mystery. 

In some ways, science and poetry draw from the same well of experience and place and curiosity. A deep and focused level of observation is involved in noticing the world around the writer, and in manifesting sensory detail of this world in a poem. What can science bring to a poem? I think it can bring a grounded acknowledgement of the connectedness between ourselves and the natural world. What can a poem bring to science? A poem creates another medium of experience that can link the emotions with the how and the why.

Two excerpts from Zayani Bhatt, The NewStatesman:

“Adding an idea from one place to an idea from somewhere else to make something that perfectly sums up the thing itself,” says Dodd. “It’s about seeing patterns in the world and translating them into something others can engage with. The best scientist and poets can do that.

“Both [poetry and science] too depend on metaphor, as the manner by which thought is explained to the lay reader and as a way of confirmation: if something like this can exist in the world, then surely this itself can too? …much of Charles Darwin’s thought was shaped by poetry - he travelled to South America to carry out research on what was to become the Origin of Species, with the poet John Milton.” – Zayani Bhatt

Consider how this poem by Thomas Lux transparently describes his thought process. He does not write from the full knowledge of an ichthyologist or a biologist. He brings into the poem his own understanding of where he stands in relation to the environment and world of the electric fish, and through his exploration of the consequences of this interesting detail of the fishes' lives, he reveals even more about the life and experience of the observer, the speaker in the poem.  He brings into the poem meaningful elements of the speaker. He also juxtaposes the scientific language with the personal.

Ode to the Electric Fish that Eat Only the Tails of Other Electric Fish,

By Thomas Lux

 

which regenerate their tails

and also eat only the tails of other electric eels,

presumably smaller, who, in turn, eat ... 

Without consulting an ichthyologist — eels

are fish — I defer to biology’s genius.

I know little of their numbers

and habitat, other than they are river dwellers.

Guess which river. I have only a note,

a note taken in reading

or fever — I can’t tell, from my handwriting, which. All

I know is it seems

sensible, sustainable: no fish dies,

nobody ever gets so hungry he bites off more

than a tail; the sting, the trauma

keeps the bitten fish lean and alert.

The need to hide while regrowing a tail teaches guile.

They’ll eat smaller tails for a while.

These eels, these eels themselves are odes!

 

Three Prompts:

1.     Choose one poem about science and begin by describing how this poem is being scientific. How could you use this similar method in your own poem?

 
2.     Choose a poem’s approach to considering science – a list, a naming, a playful riff on language and sound, a comparison or metaphor, a personification, a close observation – and model after it in you own poem. One way to begin is to choose a simple object/subject and begin with close observation and description. As you write, become more and more specific.

 
3.     “if something like this can exist in the world, then surely this itself can too?” Choose something that you feel is unbelievable or impossible or unknowable to you. Then choose something very familiar and established and known to you. Begin by describing what is known. How is it not at all like what you can’t know? How is it possibly in some facet or criteria like that unknowable thing?

 

New generative 6 week writing workshop series begins Sep 9

 

New Fall 2024 Monday Night Creative Writing Workshop Series

6 sessions in this series

A fun and generative workshop especially for journalers and writers of poetry, fiction, short story, novel, and screen writing. Do you wish you wrote more? Want to feel a sense of community when you write? Want to start a book or finish a book?

In-person and on zoom - sign up for the 6 wk series

Sept. 9 - Oct. 14

6:30-8 pm Monday nights

 $180

 

This creative series is the most popular and longest-running workshop I offer.  Craft, technique, and prompts for writing of all forms. A kick in the butt for your writing life! Waiting for inspiration is also called procrastination.  So don't wait - connect with a community and improve your fiction project and writing practice. Mondays from 6:30 to 8 pm. This series will fill up fast as I keep the size of the group intimate. Sign up by email to tangledrootswriting@gmail.com or call 530-386-3901.

Three Tips to Creating a Sense of Music in "a string of printed words"

 

What do you hear when you look deeply into this photograph of a lake I hiked to in Colorado last summer? What do you hear when you read a poem to yourself, or out loud? 

 
“I do know when a string of printed words busts my little dam and the tears spill over and I sponge them up with my T-shirt. I couldn’t give you that formula before it happens, it just hits me like a bat to the face. That’s a sweet, hot, amazing, embarrassing moment.” – Neko Case 

 
Do you want to write lines and sentences that have that power for your reader, that overwhelm the senses of the reader? 

 
Let's focus on sound for now. What are the elements in writing language on the page that help a poet create music in the line, the sentence, the poem? How do you manage meter, rhythm, rhyme/echo, cadence, syllables, stressed and unstressed syllables, syntax and enjambment and runon sentences, punctuation or lack of it?

 
“The sonic effect of every poem, whether we call it formal or free, traditional or innovative, depends on a concerted relationship between stressed and unstressed syllables, between syllables that may or may not echo one another: these effects are the material result of the poet’s manipulation of the medium. In order to describe or produce a poem’s tone, a poet can’t think profitably about tone; a poet must think about the linguistic elements that produce a poem’s tone, most prominently rhythm and echo, just as a painter who wants to achieve a certain quality of light must think more precisely about the nature of paint”- James Longenbach

 
Read this poem by Ross Gay out loud to yourself or a friend, and hear the playfulness and joy dramatized by the music of the language:

A Poem in which I Try to Express My Glee at the Music My Friend Has Given Me
By Ross Gay
                              —for Patrick Rosal
Because I must not
get up to throw down in a café in the Midwest,
I hold something like a clownfaced herd
of bareback and winged elephants
stomping in my chest,
I hold a thousand
kites in a field loosed from their tethers
at once, I feel
my skeleton losing track
somewhat of the science I’ve made of tamp,
feel it rising up shriek and groove,
rising up a river guzzling a monsoon,
not to mention the butterflies
of the loins, the hummingbirds
of the loins, the thousand
dromedaries of the loins, oh body
of sunburst, body
of larkspur and honeysuckle and honeysuccor
bloom, body of treetop holler,
oh lightspeed body
of gasp and systole, the mandible’s ramble,
the clavicle swoon, the spine’s
trillion teeth oh, drift
of hip oh, trill of ribs,
oh synaptic clamor and juggernaut
swell oh gutracket
blastoff and sugartongue
syntax oh throb and pulse and rivulet
swing and glottal thing
and kick-start heart and heel-toe heart
ooh ooh ooh a bullfight
where the bull might
take flight and win!

 
Below is another example of a poet trying out various sounds available in the syntax of a short sentence (They taste good to her) and the different implications or tones the sentence can enact in the poem. The poet is using enjambed lines, rhythm with stressed syllables, short lines, a minimum of punctuation, and sound echoes:

 
To a Poor Old Woman 

 
By William Carlos Williams

 
munching a plum on   
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand
 
They taste good to her
They taste good   
to her. They taste
good to her
 
You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand
 
Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her

 
How can you write a line that adds to the music of the language? Syntax, enjambment, and where the line breaks helps the reader understand how to sound out the rhythm and cadence and stresses in the poem. Echo also adds to this musical quality, how a line or poem is “heard”. This can be called the sonic quality of a poem.

 
Syntax is the order of the words in the sentence. Rhythm is created by which syllables are stressed and which are unstressed in your line and sentence. As you write with line breaks, you are asking yourself how you want to manage the stresses on the syllables, how you want to use rhymes (echoes of sound in the poem), how you want to indicate rhythm (a cadence) to your sentences in the poem.

 
I’ve taken these examples above from an article by James Longenbach titled The Music of Poetry. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/92652/the-music-of-poetry
 

Three Tips for creating music in your writing:

 
1.     As you write and re-enter your writing, and possibly revise, consider playing with many different ways of ordering your poem. You can write with a different syntax. You can enjamb your sentences so that a sentence runs right into the next in the middle of a line. You can cut all punctuation to see how that affects the pace of your poem. You can add echoes of a sound to your poem. 

 
2.     Marie Howe has said that she will sometimes write her draft poem in stanzas of four lines and work on creating end rhymes. Then she will re-order everything so that the rhymes occur within the lines instead of at the end of the lines. In this way she has added internal sound repetitions and avoided an overly obvious sing song effect. She will increase the sonic quality of her language in this way. 

 
3.     You can also try changing which words are stressed in your sentences. How would you do this? Maybe you play with what is stressed by changing the line breaks, or the order of words in a sentence, or you use rhyme differently. All these elements of your writing are tools that you can employ to build the music in the text on the page.