by Laurie Wagner | Aug 29, 2016 | Blog
When my friends Jen Louden and Lisa Jones invited me to Boulder, Co. this summer to go on a little hiking/writing retreat with them I leapt at the chance. Not only did I look forward to seeing my pals, I was looking forward to some real writing time. Earlier in the summer I’d spent a week with my writing mentor, Deena Metzger, at her place in Topanga, with 20 other writers, but I hadn’t done much writing since then. I’d liked what I’d started at Deena’s – it was juicy – and I figured these two friends would give me the ass kicking that I needed. They’d challenge me, they’d get past all my clever shit and push me to the wall for more. In my mind, Jen and Lisa were the real writers, while I’ve considered myself more of a writing teacher over the last 15 years. Yes I’ve written books, and yes I write with my students 10 times a week, and yes I write blog posts that I care about, but Lisa and Jen sat down daily to work on their own writing projects – their books. They had discipline, and both had agents who encouraged them. They’d made actual deadlines for themselves, and Lisa was positively unstoppable after 12 publishers had passed on her latest book. She was sure she knew how to make the right changes and she couldn’t wait to get back to work. I was in awe of her. Writing is hard work. I don’t need to tell you that. Teaching is not as hard for me, and Wild Writing – the...
by Laurie Wagner | Jun 6, 2016 | Blog
As I write this I’m in the middle of a week-long writing retreat with my writing mentor for the last fourteen-years. We’re high up in the hills of Topanga Canyon…
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...
by Laurie Wagner | Dec 10, 2012 | Blog
A couple of years ago, right after my Dad died, I fell into this funny mid-life thing where I felt really flat about teaching – felt in fact that I had taught everything I knew how to teach – that I was doing it with my eyes closed and it wasn’t serving me or anyone else. It started when I watched my Dad die a few months earlier. There we were, the whole family, my sisters and brother, my Mom – all of us sitting around Dad’s bed as he took his last breath. And as he did, this huge WHOOOOSH came straight from him to me and it screamed silently LIVE! As in STOP FUCKING AROUND WITH EXCUSES AND REASONS WHY YOU CAN’T DO THIS AND WHY YOU CAN’T DO THAT. It was a HUGE call to myself to wake up to what I was doing and to reflect on the things I’d wanted to do but told myself I couldn’t. So I made a list of some of the things I’d always wanted to pursue. I got back to guitar lessons. I moved into a coaching program, I scooted around the world of commercial ethnography – and that was all great – just the exercise of trying new things was energizing. But what I really wanted to do, if I could do anything, was to travel around the country and study with all of my favorite writing mentors – nobody I actually knew – but people whose books I’d read and taught from for years. Thing was, I didn’t have the time or the money do that....
