by Laurie Wagner | Mar 29, 2017 | Blog
“Oh mom, you’re going to be fine.” That’s my 21-year-old responding to me this morning on Facetime when I told her that I was flipping out about my brand new 5-month Wild Writing Teacher Training, which starts in one week. “You got this,” she said, rolling her eyes, and moving on to things more pressing, like “look how my skin is clearing up,” she says, bringing the Iphone up against her forehead so I can see every pore on her sweet little face. She’s right. I could teach the training this very minute, even if I’d gotten no sleep, hadn’t put my contacts in, had shown up with bed head, not enough coffee, no notes, and had forgotten to put on my pants. I mean, I’ve been doing this work for 25 years. It’s in my bones. But apparently, so is anxiety and perfectionism because I seem to need to go through a sickening amount of grief before I can swim like a brave little fish into new waters. Will the students be happy? Is there enough content to warrant a real training? Will my brain go blank in the middle of teaching and I’ll forget what I’m talking about? Can I really help these good people become Wild Writing teachers? Will they get their money’s worth? Is the coffee strong enough? Should I have gotten more chocolate? Nothing like a good dose of perfectionism mixed with the fear of humiliation to keep me awake at night. Not only that, but this anxiety has had me stay as close to home as I could these last few months, begging...
by Laurie Wagner | Dec 16, 2015 | Blog
So while it took me 24 hours to physically get home from Bali – to fly from Denpasar International Airport to Hong Kong, and then on to San Francisco – it only took me about 10 minutes in the car the next day to become some wild eyed impatient bitch who was half an inch from leaning on her horn because some dude in front of her wouldn’t turn right at the red even though he COULD HAVE.
“Oh my god,” I thought, slowly pulling my hand back from the wheel, “so this is how it starts.”
by Laurie Wagner | Sep 14, 2015 | Blog
So there we were at the Rickie Lee Jones concert in San Francisco a few months ago – my pal Ann and I. We thought we were going to be late, but it turned out Rickie Lee was even later. Apparently her band’s bus had broken down 8 hours away and had finally chug-a-lugged it into San Francisco…
by Laurie Wagner | Jun 25, 2015 | Blog
Remember that essay you had to write the first day back from summer vacation when you were a kid? This is what I hope I can write in a few months when September rolls around:
That some mornings I started the day in my nightgown on the side porch, in a patch of sun…
by Laurie Wagner | Nov 18, 2014 | Blog
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...
