by Laurie Wagner | Aug 25, 2014 | Blog
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...
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 | 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 | Apr 7, 2014 | Blog
Mostly we use poetry to inspire and jump start our Wild Writing classes over here at 27 Powers, but the other day I came across a letter my then 10-year-old Zoe wrote to her friends at school telling them why they should vote for her for student council. It captured everything I love about being a human being; these sometimes feeble, sometimes heroic attempts at love + living. I tell my students that they will get so good at Wild Writing that they can use the back of a cereal box to write from, and write something beautiful. So why not the plea of a 10-year-old girl who wants to run for office? “My name is Zoe Wagner and this is why you should pick me for student council… 1. I am not afraid to talk in front of the whole school. 2. I want to help everybody 3. You can trust me 4. I’ll work hard 5. I’ll make everything right” This is my riff on it in class this week: Why You Should Pick Me 1. I make an awesome cup of coffee 2. I don’t hog the blankets 3. I keep coconut, black sesame snacks in the freezer 4. My mother says I’m very beautiful when I cry 5. I’m learning to make a solid fire 6. I still listen to Joni and Neil 7. Cowboy boots are never the wrong choice 8. Lately I am drawn to difficult conversations 9. I carry my Grandmother’s kerchief 10. My Father left me a pair of his old reading glasses 11. My Mother and I threw two shivas...
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...
