by Laurie Wagner | May 23, 2023 | Blog
When I was starting out as a writing teacher over 20 years ago, I remember talking with my friend and mentor Mark Dahlby who ran writers.com, where I taught writing to adults for many years. I must have been going over the classes I was teaching, and at one point Mark interrupted me and he said, “Laurie, you just need to love the students.” Love them? But hadn’t they come for all my jazzy classes on memoir and personal essay? Wasn’t that what they were paying me for? What could love possibly have to do with that? In the beginning I leaned on the content of my classes – waving it in front of the students’ faces as evidence of how hard I was working for them, how much I cared – but over time I started to understand what Mark was talking about. Writing is personal and it can be vulnerable. While I was trying to do a good job editing their stories, my students wanted to be seen by me, to know that I cared about their work, and cared about them. My teaching was good enough, like a hearty pasta that any chef could stand behind, but without the hot bubbly sauce of love, it lacked something. Over time I think my teaching changed. I started to see that my attention to students mattered more than what I was teaching them in some cases. They wanted love. I thought about Mark’s words last week when I visited Chapter 510, a nonprofit in downtown Oakland that offers free writing classes, bookmaking, publishing and podcasting classes for black, brown...
by Laurie Wagner | Mar 21, 2023 | Blog
As I write this, I’m sitting on a hotel bed in San Miguel de Allende on the eve of a writing / photography workshop that my dear friend Andrea Scher and I are hosting this week. This might be our 10th workshop in San Miguel in the last five years. Some of the ladies we flew in with – all old friends of ours – have taken to the cobblestones to find dinner. I stayed back because I’m one of those introvert / extroverts who, after a long day of wandering the city as a tribe of gals, has come back to my spot of quiet to listen to music and write. It’s actually not so very quiet; There are loud explosions going off every few minutes, which our friend Erin says is courtesy of the church strongly reminding people to get their booty to the pews in the morning. Why do I love that so much? I think I like the tension of priests setting off explosions. There’s something very unabashed about that. It’s nervy, you know? Or maybe it’s just their god shouting from the heavens in a way these people can hear. I also like the half glass of wine I swiped from an art opening in the courtyard of the hotel this evening as I headed to my room. I like that as much as I like knowing that inside of the Mojiangas – the 18-foot tall puppets that parade through town – are overheated, sticky teenage boys glancing at their watches waiting for their shifts to end. I have a soft spot for those...
by Laurie Wagner | Feb 14, 2023 | Blog
One of the first things I noticed when I walked into my mother’s house last Sunday night was that she had taped the same printed message on little pieces of paper all over the house – on her bathroom mirror, on the wall across from her bed, the refrigerator, by the front door, and in her office next to the computer. The message was this: “Be aware of my body sensations. What do I want? What do I need right now?” At first, I rolled my eyes. Maybe it was that the message was in all caps, like she was shouting to herself. “It’s from my therapist,” she explained when I asked her about it, referring to the man she’s been seeing for the last 30 years, and now on Zoom once a week. “Be aware of my body sensations. What do I want? What do I need right now?” My mother has other important messages taped by her phones that she can look at when she’s talking, probably to one of her four children. “I hear you,” she’ll say. Then, “Uh huh,” and, “I understand. Tell me more.” Then there’s a note to remind her to repeat the last few words she heard the caller say. Sometimes when she’s telling me about what a great game of tennis she played, or how delicious her salad at lunch was, I say, “I hear you, Uh huh, I understand, tell me more.” “Oh screw you!” she says, laughing. Then she takes her middle finger, pretends to be picking her nose and gives me the finger instead. She got that from...
by Laurie Wagner | Jan 23, 2023 | Blog
Is it enough to take these notes? To be a collector of moments? To be someone who notices the smallest things and who writes them down? Can the bits and pieces of this life; the way he reached for my hand, the text from the sick child, the banjo sitting in the corner of my room wishing to be played be enough? Raised to be special, raised to be important, raised to do more. Is it enough to be someone who picks fallen camellias from the brick path, treasuring the ones that have lost their pink and have gone brown? Is it enough to walk the forest path with an ex-husband who stops you and says, “Listen to the trees,” and for that moment, eyes closed, the sound of the eucalyptus whispering above you is all you hear. Is it alright to make a nest in my bed three mornings this week, because I needed to work and write from a quiet place of pillows and blankets, the cat sleeping between my legs. And because the world can feel rough, but working in a nightgown and an old sweater, hair unbrushed, face unwashed can soften the blow. And can I sit with the thought I had that you can be disappointed and sad because you didn’t get what you wanted, and it’s also no one’s fault. And because we have such a wee time here, I try to keep remembering that what seems so painful in the moment won’t always feel this way. And because Andrea Gibson, the poet, asked us to consider, what if every single person you...
by Laurie Wagner | Jan 10, 2023 | Blog
So I won’t forget the look on my 85-year-old mother’s face when she came upstairs to make contact with me after our little tiff during the holidays. I write to slow that moment down so that I can remember the timid sound of her knock on my door, and the way she entered my room, eyes wide, almost unsure of what she would say. I write to remember the way I rose to meet her so we could hold each other, even though I was still mad, because there wasn’t enough time for anything else. I write so I won’t forget how in the last few years she cries in my arms when it’s time to say goodbye, even after a bumpy visit. And because words are breadcrumbs that I can follow forward and backwards so that I can track myself, and because the writer, Joan Didion said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I make these notes so that I won’t forget the moment last week when I said to my friend, “I’m sorry, I don’t want to intrude on your personal life,” and he said, “you’re part of my personal life,” and how that melted the part of me that feels like an outsider, someone who is knocking on the door, but not invited to the party. I write because David Verdesi says, ”Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” And because today, the workings of my heart – and especially its tinny and rickety bits feel...
by Laurie Wagner | Dec 20, 2022 | Blog
Some of the richest experiences I’ve had in my life have been when I’m alone, far from home, often in another country. There’s something about being one single human being standing on my own two feet, far from the comforts of home and the things I think I need to make me happy; my friends and family, my routine, the roles I play, and who I think I am. Alone and anonymous, I feel like a citizen of the world, wandering among strangers, eyes wide open and letting every new sensation pour right into me. I will never forget the run I’d take each morning on the wet streets of Bali. I remember the early morning mist as I began to climb the hill from town, and that one turn in the road where the monkeys gathered on phone lines above my head, how I had to keep my eye on them as I ran in case one swooped down to grab my hair. I remember the shopkeepers with big buckets of water, splashing the streets outside of their shops, and that one woman I saw every day, sitting on a milk carton, selling small bags of fruit and hot tea to school children and people heading off to work. I remember entering the outdoor marketplace, the commotion of voices, the piles of bright fruit; bananas and papayas, durian, mangosteen and snakeskin fruit. I remember walking through the market under the morning sun, often the only white person in the crowd, and telling myself, “I am here, I am here.” Or the time, alone and feeling a little lost...
