A Calm, Open Walk Through a Dark & Tangled Mess

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been gearing up for Four Uninterrupted Days of Writing, the four-day workshop I’m running here at 27 Powers with the inimitable Jen Louden. 17 brave souls showed up here this morning and mostly what I’ve been thinking about for these last couple of weeks is how to serve them.   Of course Jen and I have writing lessons and hand-outs. We’ve got tips, tricks and tools, and even a get up and shake your booty sound track so the writers can get out of their heads and move a little blood. We’ll have coffee and snacks and a delicious catered lunch each day, as well as plenty of time for writers to write and read their work. And while all of that is real nice, the thing I’m really wanting to support them in is learning how to create a world inside of themselves, an internal landscape that calmly allows each of them to move through their writing when they’ve forgotten what the hell their stories were about and why they mattered in the first place.   If you’re like me, you’d kill for a Google map that tells you exactly how to get from the beginning of a story right on through to the end.  I’d cream for an app that instructed me to begin the story in the scene where my Mother realizes that I have a rat’s nest – an impossible tangle of knots — in the back of my hair, then the app tells me to veer left when she screams, “If you don’t get that rat’s nest...

Burrs, rough edges & tangled mats of hair

Today’s blog post comes to you from an island of burrs, rough edges, tangled mats of hair, and seaweed clumps. Seriously, I wish I’d strung those words together myself, but I was just as glad to find them in a book called Writing Open the Mind, by Andy Couturier.   Like Andy, I am in the business of those burrs, those rough edges, tangled mats of hair and seaweed clumps. As a writer, I am interested in dark parts, those tucked away moments, not entirely pretty, sometimes hard to look at.   My mentor, Deena Metzger, says that poetry is beauty and ugliness side by side. I’m down with that kind of poetry, on the page and off – which means I’m also willing to live a more tangled, less perfect life where the pieces don’t always match and the burrs and rough edges show.   Driving around town the other day, I realized that I had been working something over in my mind for weeks without being conscious of it. I was trying to come up with some pithy statement about my marriage to offer my friends and family when I saw them at Thanksgiving the following week. “Aren’t you and Mark divorced?” I imagined them asking. “But you’re living together, right? What’s up with that?”   For weeks I’d been trying to come up with an assortment of answers that might satisfy the curious, and which would explain my colorful, paint outside the lines life. “Oh, you know us,” I’d laugh, “we’re shape shifters.” Or maybe something more serious, “Well, he needed a place to stay for a while and...

True Stories Series: Meet Lisa Sadikman

“Writing is how I round out my world, it’s how I unstick myself from the mud and make it across the meadow.”  – Lisa Sadikman Readers, when I made a list of people I wanted to interview for this column, Lisa Sadikman quickly came to mind. She’s been a Wild Writing student of mine for years – a solid writer, and someone who has had to juggle the responsibilities of mothering three young girls, running a house and taking herself seriously as a writer. No small thing. Lisa is still at my Wild Writing table, but when she’s not here she’s scribbling notes for stories as she sits in carpool lanes, or in the wee hours before her kids get up for school. Her personal essays on parenting can be found on her blog, in the Huffington Post and many other magazines. (SEE below for links) If I admire anything, it’s someone who’s willing to sit there in the midst of her mental gunk, her exhaustion, her excuses and fears and lay some ink down on the page. Lisa does this and I’m happy to share her with you today.     Lisa, I’ve been working with you for a bunch of years now and I’ve seen you go from someone who mostly wrote once a week in class — someone who knew she had more to say, but didn’t know exactly what that was — to someone who keeps a writing schedule, blogs each week and publishes regularly for the Huffington Post. I know a lot of writers who’d like to make that kind of journey with their work and I thought hearing from you would...

The Creamy Kung Foo of Writing True Stories

Writing about your real life is a tricky dance. Your life is your petri dish. You examine the things that happen, you make notes, you pay attention to small details and you consider whether you can unpack them to reveal something larger, something like a story. Moments become metaphors, lessons, things you want to understand better and share.   If you’re good at it, you’re able to take these small moments of your life and crack them open to reveal the creamy center, the universal kung foo, the place where my story becomes your story, becomes a blessing or a teaching for us all.   I believe we’re all made of the same stuff. We have different experiences and we have our opinions and different ways we stand in our stories, but we all understand what it is to long for something – love or connection. We all know what it feels like to feel small and overlooked, unseen and unimportant. We know exhaustion and defeat. We all know envy and what it is to have dirty thoughts about people we love. We know joy too – the feeling of riding a lucky wave – or just being suddenly happy for no reason except that the song on the radio has just changed your world.   And that’s where telling true stories and using authentic, down to the studs language in your writing is really helpful. When you lay it on the line and don’t try to hide or be too clever, people can connect with you, and then they can connect with themselves. And that’s part of the...

  Why We Tell Stories

Because when our children grow up we can no longer strap them into car seats, which means they’re free to roam the earth as they please, and which sometimes means they down 5 shots of vodka with their new college roommates even though they promised themselves that they’d take it slow on account of the altitude and all.   We tell stories because we struggle to find the words when the apple of our eye calls the next morning, voice craggy and full of rocks to let you know that no, she will not be helping you in your effort to find furniture for her room today because “Mama I’m very sorry but if I get up I’m going to throw up.”   We tell stories because we want to come down hard, we want to get all “You need to learn how to take care of yourself…bla bla bla, ” except that just as those words are charging out of your mouth you remember who you were when you were a college student in this very town 35 years ago.   The night you lay in your freshman bed so high you were certain the aliens were coming for you, how you closed your eyes and lay your arms by your side so you’d be ready to beam up in one piece.     The day you ate too many mushrooms and had to have your best friend Lisa walk the streets of Boulder with you for hours, reminding you what was good about your life because you had forgotten.     The Friday afternoon beer party where...