If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.

I’ve been having some rather candid conversations with fellow writers in Towson and around town about the importance of authentic writing. Repeatedly, the same troubling concern rises to the primary focus of these discussions: we do not wish to offend, yet we know that, invariably, we will.

Offend whom, you ask?

There’s a book that I refer to often. It’s called The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. The message is simple and can be found in most “good book” manuals, from the bible to the cub scout handbook. But the simplicity with which this book is written makes the agreements themselves accessible.

One of the four agreements is to never take anything personally.

Good advice for both readers and writers, I think, when the latter is doing his job authentically.

On the reader’s end, authentic writing from a son, a father, a spouse, a friend, a colleague can be terribly enlightening, but often it brings contradictions to that “role” that the writer has played with that reader over, perhaps, many years. It took me a very long time to see my parents as individuals; they shared only a fraction of their true personalities to us when we were children. By no means did they not live authentically; I believe that, on many levels, they did, especially Mom. But I didn’t care about any of that; I didn’t know any of that even existed, to be honest with you.

It did exist, though. Despite my every attempt to keep them in their roles as Mom and Dad, much to my astonishment, they were Eileen and Charles, individuals, to the rest of the world.

I imagine it is the same for you, in some manner.

For those of us who do not write, it’s not as big a deal, I think. There are fewer chances for us to bare our true souls, put them on the stage for all to see in black and white. We find convenient ways to practice a “don’t ask, don’t tell” lifestyle where we keep our authentic selves from emerging.

We’re good. We play the game and, for the most part, choose our translucent masks from the jar by the door, where they mingle a little shyly with the others of varying thickness. We even find ourselves believing that we are the mask. It shows up in our actions, our words, our beliefs. We buy into these pop-fad crises of global warming and rush to buy our hybrid cars suddenly to save the earth. We are made to feel so good, our egos soothed by our acts, doing our part, living the good, right life.

I don’t mean to mock or offend. I don’t. It is me. This is my belief and it’s not about any one of you. It’s what I feel, what I think, what I believe. When I read that you are looking for hybrid choices, I applaud your efforts and want to know if you are free for a barbecue next Thursday. That’s your choice to make. That’s your place in this world, right here, right now.

I do not mean to offend. I mean to tell you what I think. Please, do not take it personally.

But as writers, we do this as well–we anticipate criticism that we will most assuredly take personally, and then censor our writing to make our audience members nod their head in agreement. That’s what we’re after, isn’t it? Approval? We sacrifice authenticity for approval. We sacrifice genuine honesty to protect the ones we love and to preserve the images they hold of us, near and dear to their hearts.

God bless us all for our efforts.

That’s not authentic, though. As writers, we’re faced with this dilemma on a daily basis. My blog is public. But my blog entries are personal. Do I wish to be conservative? Refrain from posting opinions that might offend? Censor my thoughts and censor who I am to save the ones I love from potential hurt because they choose to take my words personally?

We can’t help it, I know. It’s what we do all day long. We are trained away from seeing and sharing all things with love; we grow suspicious, concerned, filtering all that comes in, and all that goes out.

We are becoming the first generation of artificial intelligence (AI) life forms, higher-level thinking zombies, if you will, who walk through their days and surf in their nights playing the lifelong game of PC-Perfect individuals, never wishing to offend, never wishing to misunderstand.

So many of us wish to do neither. And yet, we do, and in so doing we feel terribly sad that our efforts to live and write authentically have somehow missed their mark.

Never take anything personally.

I know. I see myself doing it even now. It’s hard. So hard, when you know that your audience sees you in so many different roles: teacher, husband, father, friend, colleague. They bring those filters to my words and gasp, shake their heads, and maybe even do a little re-read to make sure they got it all right the first time.

Never before, though, have we lived such transparent lives for all our communities to see us so vividly. We’re all making choices, however conscious (or not) those choices may be. Some are retreating, staying low, under the public radar and wrapping themselves around popular causes to insulate them from the dangers of authentic living. It’s a genuine and noble drive, for sure. There’s not much awareness happening at this level, I believe; rather, there is much awareness happening for everything but who they truly are as individuals.

We’ve had our arts programs stripped out of our schools, we have our students practicing the art of hoop writing with perfecting the tricky craft of composing brief and extended constructed responses. We are regurgitating numbers and facts and formulas and processes at lightning speeds so that school systems can boast when the annual reports are published in the morning papers: We are in the XXth Percentile; we have many reasons to celebrate. So many other schools did horribly worse. Hoorah for us.

We are not celebrating the successes of our individual students in their desperate attempts to hold on to their individuality; we celebrate that, collectively, we play a better game of jump rope than half the other schools on our block.

When they graduate, those expert jump-ropers, what do they know of authenticity? Of individuality?

Perhaps that is why so many of them flock wildly to Facebook for a little breathing room, a little sanity where they can be a little dangerous with their words, say what’s really on their minds, and feel like they’re living authentically in a bead of water that rests precariously on a dewy leaf, overlooking the rushing waters of domestication and conformity.

Look, I know it’s hard. We both need to work on it, Reader and Writer. But maybe, just maybe, if each of us comes to the page with a little sensibility, doing our best to take none of this personally, then maybe, perchance, we will not have offended the other.

Just maybe.

By all measures, I had a writer’s day.I woke up early (but not as early as I intended; still, 6 a.m. did the trick) and hit the daybook immediately, followed by a full hour of watercolors before the family started to stir. I’ve been experimenting with various blends, wet and dry brushes, all with bringing a new look to some of the photography I’ve been doing recently.

I’m having trouble with watercolor daisies, though. I’m determined to get that just exactly right by the end of the week. I’ve got a note card I want to send off, but it would be wrong to send with naturally challenged daisies…

Then it was off to the pool for about 90 minutes as my two daughters had swim lessons and my son built sand castles in the world’s most wonderful sandbox. This is a miniature playground built around a tall oak, which provides plenty of shade for the kids as they bulldoze, construct, sift, and dream away the morning hours. I brought along Natalie Goldberg’s Wild Mind to re-re-read and do some of the exercises. The first one, where she talks about ten-minute writes where you begin with one starter (”I remember”) and then take its opposite for the next ten-minute write (”I don’t remember”). Wow….

I decided to write about remembering the first time I actually workshopped a piece of writing. I remembered getting ready for the workshop, working on that first draft at my dining room table, pressing hard on that sheet of looseleaf with my blue-Bic ballpoint, pushing the ink into the paper so that, when I was finished, I had to peel the paper from the wood, where the indentations from my writing stuck to the tabletop. That was a fun write to do this morning.

Then I turned the tables and did my “I don’t remember” piece about that very same topic, and what I discovered was that I don’t remember the actual workshop. I don’t remember getting peer feedback, although I knew there must have been some. That was the whole purpose of the activity. That led me to think about my own students and the workshops we do. What do they really get out of them? Do they remember them at all?

That led me to this: What do my students really need to remember at all when I teach them writing?

I turned the page and I drafted the first chapter of what I believe to be the essentials to good writing. This chapter focused on Audience and the reasons why we resist writing in the first place. Where it ends up eventually, I don’t know. But I did cherish the thought of having these 90-minute writing sessions to focus on these chapters. 30 days at the pool means 30 chapters….

When I returned home, I shared Natalie Goldberg’s “rules of writing” with my summer grad students on our online forum, and when we went back to the pool for our own afternoon of swimming, I enjoyed reading more Goldberg, some Lamott, and a little Thich Nhat Hanh.

After dinner, I went through my old writing files and found a few gems that I can rework. I also found some email correspondence with old friends. Some of it saddened me, as much has changed over the last eight years. But much of the words reminded me of all I have to be thankful for in the present, and that was a nice surprise.

I end the night blogging, thinking about my friends out there who may be writing in their blogs, too, doing our best to stay a little sane, support each other, and express love in any way we know how.

I hope you had a good day, too. There’s so much to be grateful for…

(photo taken at Loch Raven Reservoir, Nikon D70s, 18-55mm Nikkor lens, 6/19/08)

Earlier this month I picked up Shady Grove by Jerry Garcia and David Grisman, a 13-track compilation of acoustic folk songs and ballads that Jerry and David did between 1990 and 1995. A few days ago, I heard Jerry and David do “Bag’s Groove, Take 1″ on the Dead channel on Sirius Radio, and they took me to new levels with a certain spirit and soul that seeped through the speakers and spoke to me. There was a real depth to what they were doing, and I could sense that their playing was something more than two guys getting together to strum guitars and banjos and mandolins. A purpose existed for this music.

I was right. When I bought Shady Grove, I immediately turned to the liner notes, and John Cohen, one of the original members of the New Lost City Ramblers, wrote poignantly about the passion each had for the ballad, the folk song that captured a deeper, more genuine spirit of the traditions of American music. On separate coasts in the early sixties, Jerry and David pursued relentlessly that soul of America.

This got me thinking. What do I pursue?

Some of us pursue the origins of our ancestry; others pursue our collections, ranging from Dead concerts to stamps to first editions; still others pursue that return to innocence, our spiritual births, our origins of balance. More than a few psychologists have professed that we live our adult lives striving to return to our Querencia, or home, the place that brings us complete and unconditional comfort and the feeling of invincibility.

I wonder if Thoreau had this last group in mind when he wrote about the “masses of men leading lives of quiet desperation” in “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” from his Walden collection of essays.

I can probably say that any one of these (except for the collecting of stamps) fits me to some extent, at various times in my life/year/month/day/moment. But that’s just the problem. I flit back and forth between them so frequently that none of them get the attention necessary to sustain momentum, growth, progress toward that specific pursuit.

That’s why I feel pretty good about the choices I’ve made this new year. I’m pursuing the yoga and the walking with an ever-strong pace that is strengthening with each passing day, where I can say I was committed to this small choice. And there’s this virtual walk I’m planning for this spring/summer; that will be fun.

But is that enough? Maybe I am the desperate man Thoreau speaks of when I believe that I should be pursuing something greater, something nobler.

I dig deep, deep down inside of me to see what I pursue. . . .

Remove the road blocks, the obstacles, the lesson plans and endless (but wonderful) family commitments, and I’m left with this:

I pursue the absolute, pure expression, through writing and various art media, of who I am as an artist, as an individual, so that I may leave my mark on the world as I witnessed it, lived it, wished it to be.

I write this with confidence because I had a piece of writing rejected recently, and at first, I was upset about the rejection. The feedback was that the work of fiction “crossed over” into the nonfiction genre and made it too essay-ish. Initially, I thought about how I might change it, what I might do to make it more amenable to this specific audience. In other words: what can I do to satisfy my audience?

I’ve written previously that the good writer is sensitive to her audience and needs to consider what is expected of the piece. But we can’t apply that general statement to all writing. In my work with developing the concept of the metalogical writer, I’ve created a graphic where the focus of the piece can shift to the author, the audience, or the piece itself. As authors, we decide what is best for our piece.

If you were to graph out all of my published works, I am sure you’ll find that the large majority of them were for somebody else, some audience I whored myself to with my writing. Very, very few of the pieces I’ve had published were Pure Rus: uncensored, with a focus on me and a style that I wanted for that particular piece for my particular reasons. These are the pieces that were written with what I would call “artistic intent,” where the artist knows her voice so well that she isn’t afraid to use it, even if it goes against the mainstream genres. When we do this with intent–use our voice and select our form–we need to make critical decisions about how far we will compromise our gift to give the masses what they say they want.

This rejection made me smile. I write for me first now. There was undeniable “artistic intent” when I wrote that piece, simply because that is the style I chose to connect with my readers. So now, I’m going back to Cold Rock and a few other pieces, revise the parts that I think need work, and then publish it. I’m no longer compromising who I am as an artist for the sake of giving the masses more of what they are already getting.

If I can’t pursue my individuality in this fog of conformity, then what’s the sense of writing anything at all? If I can’t claim my voice, my soul in my work, what’s the difference between these pieces and the work I’ve whored in the past?

Really, folks. Pursue you. Whether it’s in your photography, your yoga, your writing, your anything: pursue you fully in all that you do. It’s the only way to let the world know that you were really here at all.

My “check engine” light came on last Thursday, but it wasn’t like I was surprised. A few months ago I heard a report on NPR that the 3 months/3,000 miles mantra for changing your oil no longer applied to cars that had been made in the last 5 to 7 years. Apparently, cars are built now to need oil changes every 10,000 to 16,000 miles. Good news for most; bad news for me. That’s how long I usually waited to get my oil changed when I was following the  3,000-mile rule. With the new guidelines, I’ve created my own mathematical equivalent. Up until a few days ago, I thought I’d be able to make it to at least 30,000 miles before I would have to change my oil again.

Um….I was incorrect.

So, I’ll take care of this in the days ahead, probably even Monday or Wednesday. I know that, once I get a fresh few pints of oil running through my car’s veins, every little thing’s gonna be all right.

My own internal “check muse” light came on a few days ago, as it had been too long since I took the time to stop by the Bean Hollow in historic Ellicott City and share good coffee and even better words with a good friend. We’ve been meeting on a monthly basis, for the most part, and sharing our own work as well as what we’ve experienced in attending conferences and readings as well as entering competitions.

A month is a good span of time where each of us is fueled by the discussion, but for reasons mostly beyond our control, we’ve had to cancel several of our monthly meetings. In fact, I believe the last time we met was at the end of the school year last June. Far too long to deprive the muse of such nourishment.

We met for only 90 minutes or so yesterday. He talked of his recent successes with his playwriting, not to mention the completion of his first novel; I talked of my shift in focus from giving to taking, so that I may give a little differently in the months and years to come. After two glasses of iced tea, one mug of black Hollow Blend coffee, and a bagel with hummus (let’s not forget the yummy vegan chocolate espresso chip cookie, too), we both left filled in a different way, motivated to carry on another month with our writing, our vehicle that gets us creatively from one place to another, perhaps a little more safely than we realize.

Personally, it’s more than all that it ever seems to be on the surface when we are there and right after we leave. In the bigger picture, it’s the muse maintenance I need to keep going with the belief that there is a genuine, inherent importance in what I am doing. It’s not about fame, or success, or recognition or even acceptance; it’s about moving on to the next piece that needs to be born, shared, experienced, so that the next idea, the next work, can have its time, too.

I spent nearly the entire day yesterday immersed in the study of reading and writing. It was an intense day that started a little before 6 a.m., where I wrote about 3,000 words in my daybook about various things; that writing session served no other purpose than as my Morning Pages, epic-style, for those of you who know Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.

On most good days, I stop there. But I had the time (I have no idea how this happened) to push through and look for publishing opportunities for the upcoming year. One of the main ideas to emerge from my early-morning writing was to create some real, reachable goals to further my writing career a little more aggressively. So, with very little effort, I found about 25 markets that suited me perfectly. While most of these publications are not paying markets, they would provide me with some necessary big-name clips to make the paying markets give me a second look when I’m pitching a feature idea or submitting a new piece of fiction.

I selected four markets for the upcoming academic year: one fiction, one nonfiction, and two scholarly education publications. Their deadlines range from September to January, so they are spread out nicely over my peak writing season, the fall and early winter.

The piece that is due December 1, the short fiction, has me most concerned. I should have no problem at all with the creative nonfiction piece due in October (the subject is nature), and the two scholarly pieces, due in September and January, are in my field of specialty: metacognition and motivating reluctant writers. It’s that short fiction piece that is generating anxiety. Most of my fiction has been rejected, and I wanted to know why. I thought the writing was good enough for strong consideration, but most places where I submit to disagree. I decided to read a little more about the structure of the short story and see if I could see any glaring weaknesses in my approach.

I was very surprised by what I learned–not necessarily that the information seemed like breaking news to me; rather, that the information seemed like something I should have known (and was probably taught) many years ago. Yet, in all of my conversations with fellow writers and colleagues, the purpose of the short story has never really been discussed. We always spend so much time talking about the stories themselves and not about their greater purpose.

So what does all that mean? Perhaps my colleagues and writer-friends all know this, and they’ve made the awful assumption that I, too, have been writing with such a deeper understanding of the short story. But I confess now, for the entire world to read, that for all these years I have never given the purpose of the short story much thought. Instead, I have focused on the importance of the writing process to tell a good story, a story that entertains. Here’s what I’ve been missing all these years. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, well, well. Much to share.

Finished reading A Simple Plan. I think I mentioned that in an earlier entry. I bring this up again because I am thrilled with what I learned from Scott Smith’s style. Concise. Powerful. Each word matters.

More than that, though, I realized something about Story. You gotta want it, man. You really got to get into the type and work from the inside out. It’s the only way to make your writing Pop. What I mean, I guess, is this: There can be nothing driving but the story. You aren’t writing for an audience (at least not directly), you aren’t writing to win a contest, you aren’t even writing to publish.

You’re writing to bring some thing to life vibrantly, vividly, using 26 letters in black ink on white paper. Talk about your challenge of a lifetime. And you get only one chance. How else can you do it if you’re not inside the story, inside the pen, in the ink, on the page, shouting out to your reader, “You are simply not going to believe this. But I swear. I swear to God. This is the absolute truth, even if none of it ever happened.”

(my humble thanks to the great Chief Bromden for that last thought…)

I know, I know. It’s all contradicting everything I’ve always taught and believed, but it’s true. If you write to bring that story to life and use all the elements at your fingertips–I mean really use them, then all those other things: audience, awards, and publications–they’ll come to you anyway. And if they don’t now, they will when you’re dead, when they realize just how genuine and passionate and ahead of it all you really were.
So that’s why I call this Revisions and Re-Visions. Last night, near midnight, I was on the elliptical trainer at the gym, and the rewrites to my book Cold Rock came to me somewhere around mile 2. Great stuff, I believe (but nobody but my buddy SK will hear of it; I think I’ve reached the point where I need to talk less and write more).

The rewrites focus on the majors: character development, stronger plot, reality-driven. I’ve already started. I’m shooting to wrap up the rewrite by the end of December. Then we’ll see where it stands. I have a good feeling, though, that by adopting this inside-out process, I’m going to make it Pop.

The other Revision–or re-vision, is simply about my own renegotiations with what my vision is in living fully and balancing my writing and my teaching and my photography. It’s who I am. Like I was mentioning to one of my friends yesterday at school, you have to let your art out. You have to be in love with what you do all the time.

You got to live life from the inside out. Just like I got to write about it. . . .

It really is that simple. Now if we could only convince ourselves of it.

“Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth… But amusing? Never.”

–Edna Ferber

I am just beginning to understand the depth and the genuine meaning of this quote. I have spent so much of my life on the non-published side of writing, where there was amusement experienced in all that I did in the world of writing: where I would write, what pen I would use, which daybook was best, when the best time of the day was to write.

I don’t find any of these aspects of writing trivial; I think they are all necessary if they contribute to the full balance of the writer’s world. If, however, they are what defines the writer’s world, then there is great imbalance. The reason they are called amateurs is simply because that is what they remain–a person not compensated for his or her work.

It’s the attention and energy we give to other side of writing that makes the difference. For years, I have made the claim that I am a writer–and I am one by definition. In the past decade I have published over 75 pieces in local, regional, and national publications. However, I have yet to cross that all-important, yet quite invisible line of sustaining any real income with my writing.

This is where the amusement ends for me. Publishing those 75+ pieces has been good fun. Those jobs have brought in $100 or so mostly, maybe $250 every once in a while. Nothing above that, though.

I’ve stopped the Merry-Go-Round. Pulled the plug on the whole park.

I’m at work now, ditch digging and mountain climbing, and I’ve never been happier about being dis-amused.

:)

As I hit the home stretch with this piece, I dare ask a few questions for serious discussion:

1. Should writers take risks with their writing that some may deem innapropriate, including members of the writer’s family and those in his/her social/professional circle?
2. When a writer shows you, the reader, his/her raw side, do you appreciate that?
3. Do you believe writers who are teachers of high school students should write such pieces and publish them, even if they are not the intended audience of that publication, but they may read what is written?
4. If a writer does not write in this way, is s/he being unfaithful to the readers, to society, to future generations about the accuracy of this life as seen through that writer’s eyes?

Soon I will post my completed manuscript on how writing heals, but I find the whole experience healing in actually writing the piece. There has been little stress associated with this story, and it has been one of those cathartic experiences that showed me just how “unhealed” I still am about several issues in my life, including my father’s death.

Dad died in 1989 from hepatitis that he contracted while in the fire department. He and his partner were on a medical run with an AIDS patient, they both got infected from the patient, and both my father and his partner died. The City Fire Department refused to recognize these as deaths “in the line of duty” despite several challenges from both families. The months and even years following his death were confusing, as they still are, and I now know that I have much research to do in recreating the events that took place on that medical call and subsequently thereafter, leading up to and after his death on April 22.

That’s one story that has to be written by me, about him.

The other story that is ready to surface and be shared with the world is more about me and my own relationship with my father. I was 24 when he died, and my desires and needs to please were so strong at that point in my life that I was not able to see clearly my father for the individual that he was, separate of me. I think it’s hard for children to see their parents as individuals with goals and dreams, many of them unrealized for various reasons. It’s hard to see our parents as human beings who might struggle with the same things we struggle with. Beyond money, beyond health, they struggle with similar issues of love and an identity of who they are in this world, to themselves, to others.

We see them as our mothers and fathers, and it takes a long time to let go of that thought that they are individuals who have had identities and lives long before we came along in this world.

Mom is 80 and battling Cancer and various age-related illnesses, but I am old enough now to see her for the true individual she is. I never got the chance to do that with Dad while he was still alive, and in all these years since his death, my understanding of him as an individual has been locked in through the eyes of a 24 year old. The way I felt, the way I acted, the person I was on the day he died seems to be the person I become every time I think of Dad. All of those selfish filters fall over the memories, and I could not get beyond seeing him as my father first and as an individual a distant second.

Until now. Writing about healing has provided me the chance to heal his passing and remove some of those filters. Like anything else, the process is not complete, and it will continue to take many hours with pen in hand to work beyond the exclusive He’s-My-Dad vision of who this man genuinely was. But in the last 72 hours, I’ve given my father the room he needs to be an individual first, and that is the greatest respect I can give him for all that he gave to us in his short 63 years of life.

just a quickie, here. I’m working on a piece right now for a new lit journal, and it’s about healing through writing. All my life, I’ve used writing to help me through tough or challenging situations, and even now, during this summer, I am thankful that I have turned to writing to help me get through such tough times that I and other members of my family have been going through.

And even more deeply, I’ve come to realize today that writing about healing is therapeutic in itself, and this metacognitive practice brings me closer to the center, closer to balance than any other activity I might do.

it is truly a healthy and spiritual act to write as often as I do, and I am grateful that putting words down on paper can be so good for me.

that’s it for now. Back to working on this piece. My deadline’s tomorrow (yikes!). I’ll post all 2000 words of it here when I am finished.

Love and peace to all!