by Laurie Wagner | May 27, 2014 | Blog
“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.” – Agnes De Mille If you’re a woman, you’ll understand when I tell you that writing this blog post has been exactly like changing your clothes 17 times before you leave the house. Not pretty. Not easy. You upend your closet looking for something comfortable that also makes you look good, that hides the parts of you that you’re less in awe of. No. This hasn’t been one of your throw-down-some-thoughts-and-post-it kind of blogs. It’s been more like, Does this blog post make me look fat? Does this blog post reveal the part of me that waits for the sun to go down so I can watch another episode of Scandal? Does this blog post pull the curtains back on the part of me that feels flat, dull and without inspiration? The part of me that wanders around my house doing laundry, washing dishes and surfing the internet because I’m not inspired to do anything else? The part of me that wants people to see my “good side” so they’ll want to work with me? Because if it does, I’m in trouble. That’s why I find this Agnes De Mille quote so beautiful and so troubling. I mean, it’s one thing to do this marvelous work of not knowing, of leaping into the dark on the...
by Laurie Wagner | May 12, 2014 | Blog
25 years ago I was introduced to a world of poets who would change everything I thought I knew about poetry – which wasn’t much. I didn’t have a traditional education – grew up in hippy alternative schools in Los Angeles – didn’t read the classics, not even in college. The poetry I did see was way over my head though; oblique, impossible to understand. It made me feel stupid. The less I understood a poem, the more important it seemed to be. When I moved to Berkeley in 1982 I took a wonderful creative writing class from Cecile Moochneck, and I got turned on to poets like Sharon Olds, Marie Howe, Ellen Bass + Mary Oliver. That was just the beginning. Turns out there’s a whole world out there of amazing writers – narrative poets – story telling poets whose poems speak so clearly to the predicament of our lives; the way we mean to love and what we end up doing instead. Poems have become, for me, a way to embrace my life in all its complexity. They’re like tea leaves, or mantras, and they’re full of instruction. I love what my friend, the writer Deena Metzger said when she spoke of poetry as “beauty + ugliness side by side.” If you’ve been in my Wild Writing classes you know that I use poetry to jump start our writing because poets have an opportunity to say the most important things in just a few words. As writers, we can learn so much from this economy of language and what it means to choose a word and run with it. A poet whose work I’ve used a lot in class, and really respect is...
by Laurie Wagner | May 6, 2014 | Blog
When my friend + long time student, Lisa Sadikman asked me if I wanted to participate in a blog hop where writers get a chance to write about their writing process I said sure, then immediately regretted it because I had just promised myself that I wouldn’t say yes to anything more until I’d completed the pile of projects on my desk. But if I’m anything, I’m a girl who stands by her commitments — which isn’t always smart, but in terms of commitments, writing is probably the best thing you could say yes to because everyone knows that those deadlines are everything to getting ink onto the page. So thank you Lisa. Below are my answers to the four questions traveling from blog to blog. Next week, two wonderful friends of mine and writers — Sherry Richert Belul and Jill Salahub will share their thoughts on writing via their blogs. What am I working on/writing? Most of my writing these days happens in the Wild Writing classes I teach each week here in the Bay Area. For two hours, five mornings a week, I have the pleasure of sitting around a table with 8 other women writing really quickly and really badly. That’s one of the tenants of the class — to write as poorly as possible. It’s not a joke — it’s a totally freeing way of getting past our ingrained attempts at looking good, smart and clever — which is pretty much what we’re trying to do most of the time — on the page and off. It’s unconscious, a throw-back from the days when it was dance or...
