by Laurie Wagner | Sep 9, 2014 | Blog
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...
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 | 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 27, 2014 | Blog
“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.” – Agnes De Mille If you’re a woman, you’ll understand when I tell you that writing this blog post has been exactly like changing your clothes 17 times before you leave the house. Not pretty. Not easy. You upend your closet looking for something comfortable that also makes you look good, that hides the parts of you that you’re less in awe of. No. This hasn’t been one of your throw-down-some-thoughts-and-post-it kind of blogs. It’s been more like, Does this blog post make me look fat? Does this blog post reveal the part of me that waits for the sun to go down so I can watch another episode of Scandal? Does this blog post pull the curtains back on the part of me that feels flat, dull and without inspiration? The part of me that wanders around my house doing laundry, washing dishes and surfing the internet because I’m not inspired to do anything else? The part of me that wants people to see my “good side” so they’ll want to work with me? Because if it does, I’m in trouble. That’s why I find this Agnes De Mille quote so beautiful and so troubling. I mean, it’s one thing to do this marvelous work of not knowing, of leaping into the dark on the...
