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