by Laurie Wagner | Aug 5, 2014 | Blog
Day after day, day after still day,The summer has begun to pass away… -from Summer’s Elegy, by Howard Nemerov I can’t be sure, but I think we’ve come to the part of the summer where we’re tilting a little too heavily toward the fall. You can almost see September if you squint. So I won’t, though I do feel like I’ve been put on notice: Attention! Laurie! Have as much fun as you can in the next three weeks! Get to the movies! Go camping! Sleep in! Make bonfires! It’s like my mother giving me the ten-minute warning before it’s time to get out of the pool. For me, this is a serious warning because fall hits hard around these parts with lots of classes happening here and a schedule that begs me to get some sleep and take care of myself. There are big personal changes afoot too; both my girls will be going to school in Colorado this year, one in Boulder, the other in Leadville, which means the empty nest has landed – a little earlier than expected. After I return from taking them to Colorado, I’ll enter that new phase, which is sort of an old phase – the phase I had before I met their dad, before one became two, became three, became four. I’m going back to one now. It’s daunting, it’s a little scary, but I think I can do it. I have a memory of this moment before I married their dad, 100 years ago. I was living on the third floor of this building, in a tiny studio apartment in Oakland. It was essentially...
by Laurie Wagner | Jul 14, 2014 | Blog
And so, after a couple of fairly unproductive days of writing – or – not writing – as the case was – days where I’d meant well, had made a little nest on the couch, surrounding myself with not only a pile of bills, but a list of writing assignments and essays I’d started, but which were going nowhere. After all that, I found myself jogging in my town with a little group of work out buddies from my gym. Most of us aren’t real runners, we just take orders from this horribly fit man named Nate who has no fat on his body, and who we pay to push us around. Yesterday he told us to run five times around a hot, city block, lift heavy weights – sometimes running with those weights – do planks, crunches and an assortment of other horrible things – all of it culminating in something called a burpy, where you throw yourself onto the ground, do a push up and then jump – no – leap into the air and clap your hands like you’re simply delighted, when in fact, you really just want to throw up. We did this like 25 times. So there I was running and feeling sorry for myself because I’m certain I’m not built to run, and my middle aged legs feel heavy, and I’m huffing and puffing and tears are leaking out of my eyes, and I’m hoping that all this hard work will pay off so I can fit into these dresses which I want to wear for these upcoming weddings. And then...
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...
by Laurie Wagner | Mar 17, 2014 | Blog
A writer friend and I were walking recently and discussing the challenge of writing about deeply personal experiences. We agreed that writing about the important events or people in our lives was a way to unpack and understand them better. That was good. On the other hand, maybe certain things shouldn’t be written about because bringing them out into the light of day might take them from the sacred to the mundane, and even cheapen them to some degree. We’d have to rely on words and sentences, and perhaps we’d be misunderstood or the depth of our feelings wouldn’t be conveyed. As writers we weren’t sure how to approach this, how to use writing to crack open our lives so that we might investigate and share them, but not deaden them or turn them into sound bites. It reminded me how careful I’d been when my husband and I decided to split up after 26 years, about the language I chose to talk and write about it with. Before I even started telling people, I realized that the words I chose to tell the story with would get replicated and used again and again, by me. Words would be strung together to become sentences, and sentences would be strung together to become the story. And then the story would be “the way it was,” which would only be a slice of what was actually true. I wanted to be mindful of that. I wanted to remember that 26 years with another person couldn’t and shouldn’t be reduced to a short, pithy paragraph, an explanation. But then, we’re writers, so we...
