“Finding My Bliss Means...”

In her introduction to “Bliss: Writing to Find Your True Self” – my latest topical treat from Powell's bookstore – Katherine Ramsland, Ph.D. (I append the letters with mock gravitas that fails to mask my bit of bitterness) says, “Bliss is the natural direction we should take, the perfect work for us because it inspires maximum creativity and performance.” She also acknowledges that it's not always easy to figure out just what our bliss might be, because “finding your bliss means being clear, becoming motivated, staying committed and listening to your inner sense of direction.”

To my jaded inner ear, her writing sounds...well, pedestrian, not given to flights of fancy, but since she claims that the writing exercises in her book are “key” for readers hoping to find their bliss, I've decided to indulge her (and myself). Sometimes it's important to give someone the benefit of the doubt.

So, her first exercise asks the reader to finish this thought: Finding my bliss means...

Here's what I came up with, more or less – and just FYI, I spent at least three solid hours on this, so wrapped up in writing (and ripping out pages, and rewriting) that I completely forgot to eat lunch:

Finding my bliss means exploring not just mountaintops and tidepools, but also the vacant lots and leafy interiors of the soul. It means gathering all my favorite weeds and turning them into words: dandelions and crimson clover, yarrow and vetch, miner's lettuce and cowslips. It means sewing stories from star thistles, weaving the unlikely magic of metaphor.

Finding my bliss means letting myself be the painstaking work in progress, the shirt forever short a sleeve, the swan never completely transformed. It means making time and staying with my task, though nettles burn my fingers and duty sometimes strikes me dumb.

Finding my bliss means that when my brothers and sisters wing their way toward me across the evening sky, I will recognize them as human, and have a present ready for every one. It means learning how to create costumes that can break spells, revealing the true forms of those who try them on.

And finding my bliss means being satisfied with these minor miracles, accepting the grace of “good enough.”

Teaching in the Twilight Zone

If I end up teaching another Freshman Composition course, it will be because I have failed to land a part-time job in a coffee shop.

Come September, I have been telling myself for several months now, I will start looking for work.

After scrolling through about a hundred job postings this morning, I'm beginning to realize that I have a somewhat unconventional idea of what constitutes a job – even in a city that's famously been touted as “the place where young people go to retire.”

Job = an excuse to get out of the house and interact with people somewhere other than the playground.

Job = an opportunity to try something new without having to pay for that privilege.

Oh, yeah, and no commuting, please. Walking distance from my apartment would be perfect.

That's not asking too much, is it?

But there was only one listing that met my criteria, and I didn't meet theirs. Cravin Raven Bakery has a $10/hour position open, but they want someone with “extensive experience” doing “production baking in a commercial kitchen” – or, failing that, someone who's recently graduated from a culinary program.

Pat it, roll it, mark it with an 'X'...

On the other hand, there are continuous openings for part-time composition instructors at Portland Community College.

And do you know WHY there are continuous openings?

Because Freshman Composition is the Twilight Zone of academia.

Review of Susan Wooldridge's Foolsgold

From time to time, I'll be posting reviews of books I'm reading, so long as they're topically relevant.

Foolsgold: Making Something from Nothing and Freeing Your Creative Process. It's a long title, but it could hardly be more germane to what I'm doing. Plus, the cover has a cool picture of a woman in a red dress, dancing with a bunch of colored scarves. For several years now, I've been thinking about ways to combine bodywork and creative writing. So, I bought the book and read it.

Here's the thing: I identified way too much with the author of this book. I must have looked at the author photo on the inside of the dust jacket a dozen times, and every time, Susan smiled radiantly back at me, dark haired & clad in her bright turquoise t-shirt. She looked like someone I'd like to know. But her book kept annoying me.

So, this is going to have to be a a review in the reader-response tradition, because I can't hope to be objective here.

Each chapter in this book is divided into two sections: some personal reflections (memoir stuff, in which Susan tells us about her life), followed by some suggestions to the reader about what s/he might do with what's been “learned” by bearing witness to the author's experiences in the first part of the chapter. Susan might tell us about how she's coping with her father's death, or the end of her marriage of 30 years; she might recount an experience of walking by a creek and gathering bits of junk to glue into her blue collage boxes; or maybe she will describe what it's like teaching poetry to juvenile delinquents. Whatever it is, she ties it to a lesson – and man, those lessons pissed me off.

However genteel and appropriately first-person-plural Susan's imperatives might have been, they kept delivering the same message to me: “Do this if you want to be like me.”

First off, the idea of being like anyone else is a horror to me. Second (or maybe this is the same thing), I'm already too much like the author as it is. She lives in northern California; I spent 5 years there, and remember it vividly – those drives to the Sacramento airport on foggy winter mornings? Been there. She also lives in a co-housing community. Done that. She has two children, a boy and a girl. So do I.

She doesn't organize her writing very well, loosely stitching together a few ideas and then calling them a “chapter,” with no satisfying narrative arc over the course of the book. She naively assumes her readers will be fascinated by the details of her own personal transformation – her insights, her relationships, her symbolic daffodils, her love of words, her idiosyncratic struggle to understand what it means to be a human being. Hmmm. Sounds like someone else I know.

Also, she uses the word “heck” a whole heckuvalot: “What the heck does this have to do with the creative process?” (p. 104); “Where the heck do our words come from, anyhow?” (174); “To heck with poems, boxes, books, the 'product.'” (217). It's a verbal tic, and it makes me wonder, “Who the hell edited this book?”

All that said, Susan Wooldridge has some good advice. If I can get past my own projections, I might benefit from taking her words to heart.

My Writing C.V. (Part Two)

Age 23 (cont.): I have the good fortune of being allowed, as an English Master's student, to take graduate-level creative writing classes for my electives. There's room in my schedule for three electives during the 2-year program, and I take three creative writing courses: one in poetry, one in fiction, and one in nonfiction. Probably the most encouraging comment I've ever gotten on my writing comes from the well-known poet and memoirist who teaches the nonfiction class: holding up the personal essay I've given him to look over, flapping the pages at me as if to get my attention, he says, “Do you even know how good this is?”

Age 24: My poetry professor encourages everyone to write formal poems – terza rima, ghazal, sonnet. Most of what I produce in this class is dismally, abysmally bad.

Age 25: I attend Writers @ Work in the summer of 1999. Lucy Grealy – who, later that same summer, will start using heroin, entering a spiral of self-destructive behavior that will kill her before she sees 40 – is teaching a class on memoir writing. I've submitted the same personal essay one of my professors praised two years ago. Although she can't possibly know that this is an old piece I'm recycling, Lucy seems to intuit that I'm freezing up. To everyone's surprise, and to palpable envy from my workshop classmates, she says, “This is a great essay. There's really nothing this writer needs to fix. In fact, it could probably get published, just as it is.” Then, to me, she adds, “It's like a perfectly executed finger-warming exercise on the piano. Now, move on.”

Age 26: Instead of moving on, I enter a 5-year creative hiatus. But, on the upside, my academic writing flourishes. I'm awarded a $10K fellowship, and all I have to do is write an 8-page paper on Nabokov's Lolita and present it at the Humanities Institute symposium.

Age 27: I write lots of long letters to a friend and former professor of mine. I also begin freelance editing, which, after I stop teaching, will become a “career” of sorts.

Age 28: I write two articles for the Oxford Encyclopedia. It takes me all summer. I'm paid $700.

Age 29: I live with my family in Denmark for a semester, during which time Tyler studies Scandinavian architecture, Everest attends 2^nd grade at an International School, and I utterly fail to make progress on my Ph.D. dissertation. In those four months, I produce a grand total of 5 pages of notes on Faulkner and a one-page allegory about a woman who decides to give up chocolate.

Age 30: For my birthday, a friend books me a massage. During the session, I confess to the massage therapist that I hate academic writing, that my real love is creative writing. He tells me I must get myself a copy of The Artist's Way, so I do. For the next several months, I faithfully follow Julia Cameron's advice.

Age 31: Although I'm still not really writing, I teach a free poetry-writing class. My “students” are my friends and neighbors.

Age 32: One of my friends is thinking about taking a class in photography, and I'm worried about it, because taking classes in writing has ruined me as a writer. My friend doesn't buy this logic, and challenges me to take up poetry again. So I do.

Age 33: I attend Writers @ Work for the second time. For my nonfiction workshop, I've written a new personal essay. For my individual session, I've submitted ten new poems. The essay gets a basically positive response. The poetry gets a more cautiously positive response.

Age 34: After a horrendous falling-out with my best friend, I embark on a self-designed course in Narrative Therapy. She and I eventually manage to patch things up.

Age 35: I spend several months writing for one hour a day, five days a week, on a topic selected at random from a sugar bowl. The topics are actually just words (e.g., green, destruction, art, duplicity) that I've written on little strips of paper.

Age 36: For about 9 months, I keep an anonymous blog, averaging over a dozen entries each month. It's the first time I've written both prolifically and for quasi-public consumption. It's also the first time I have enjoyed the process more than the product.

My Writing C.V. (Part One)

Age 9: I write a winning poem (“...a magical kite / flying at night / flying over the sea with me...”). I get to go to a workshop in a city an hour's drive away, where I play with little white mice and listen to Lois Lowry give a keynote speech. My poem is published in an anthology along with the poems from other winners.

Age 10: I receive my first rejection letter: my manuscript for Griselda the Grasshopper, a children's book I have written & illustrated, “does not meet our publication needs at this time.”

Age 11: I start keeping a regular journal.

Age 12: My first creative writing teacher introduces the class to the concept of “freewriting”. My classmates are all high school juniors and seniors, and they endure my presence with good grace and not a little teasing. When it comes time to vet poems submitted to the school's literary magazine, the other kids vote in every poem I have submitted (no doubt recognizing my handwriting, and not wanting to hurt my feelings). The teacher takes me aside to explain that it wouldn't be fair for me to have more than one poem in the magazine; she asks me to pick my favorite. It isn't until I see the issue in print that I realize that this one-poem-per-poet rule apparently applies only to me.

Age 13: I write two chapters of a historical romance in which a 15-year-old girl named Charlotte (Charie, for short) is supposed to end up shipwrecked on an island after her channel crossing to Britain goes awry.

Age 14: My second creative writing class is a little less inspiring than the first, but at least two of my poems get published in the literary magazine this time. On the other hand, I'm also taken in by a scam: after sending in some poems to a contest, I learn that I am among the winners, and need only send $15 to receive my copy of the publication. I'll never see those poems, or that $15, again.

Age 15: I take a pair of scissors to A Streetcar Named Desire and rearrange the pieces to make a long monologue that ends very dramatically with a wistful, southern-inflected, “They told me to take a streetcar named Desire...and then switch to one called Cemeteries...and get off...at Elysian Fields....” As Blanche Dubois, I win a lot of trophies.

Age 16: My A.P. English teacher tells me that my essays need to be more “discursive.” When I ask him what that means, he says, “It means you need to organize your ideas better.” It isn't until years later that I learn he's got it backwards: “discursive” actually means “free-flowing; rambling.”

Age 17: I begin penning heavy allegories and using freewrites to figure myself out.

Age 18: At BYU, I take another creative writing class – the theme is “Passions.” I've been watching a lot of Bergman and Tarkovsky, plus dealing with an existential crisis, which means that I treat the course as therapy. My final project elicits stunned bewilderment from the professor, who calls my writing “Kafkaesque” and adds, “...Help!”

Age 19: As Student Supervisor at the Sweet Shoppe in the Student Union, I type up a letter detailing all the inefficiencies I have noticed while working there – I cover everything from scheduling to ordering supplies to the way in which rangy, schizophrenic Aura mashes up the oreos we use for cookies 'n' cream milkshakes. When I show this rhetorical masterpiece to my husband, he says it's disorganized. But hey, my hourly wage gets raised to $5.35.

Age 20: When Tyler and I hike over 1,000 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, I try my hand at travel writing. I keep a public journal, mailing installments home every time we stop in a town to restock our supplies.

Age 21: Having decided to return to college as an English major, I use up every single elective allotted to me on creative writing classes. One of my instructors tells me he doesn't just like my poetry – he respects it. He admires it. And he is going to be “brokenhearted” if I don't continue writing it. The eccentric professor of my Gender Roles class seems to concur; she tells me she hopes I am planning to be a writer some day. But when I consult one of my English professors about whether I ought to apply to the M.F.A. program in creative writing, he says that M.F.A.'s are a dime a dozen, and the M.A.-to-Ph.D. route is the one that makes most sense.

Age 22: Between degrees, I do a brief stint in journalism. I write a few reviews for CitySearch, getting something like $12 per article. I collaborate with my mother-in-law on a story about storage units, abandoned stuff, and the mysterious disappearance of a family with three midget children; it wins some kind of award.

Age 23: I start graduate school. Because I have been given a teaching fellowship, I also begin what will become a 10-year career in teaching composition. I'll attempt to teach my students how to write essays that don't annoy me when I'm grading them. I'll spend a lot of time sitting propped up in bed with a stack of papers on my lap, scribbling purple notes in the margins about factitious cohesion and nominalizations.

Poetry Bake-Off Grand-Slam Round-Robin Thingummy

This afternoon, at a green picnic table under the sweetgum trees in Portland's Westmoreland Park, a Grand Experiment in Poesy was conducted by four Utterly Dedicated Writerly Types, amid the fanfare of shrieking children on the playground and honking geese in the close-cropped clover.

Said Writerly Types included myself, my husband Tyler, my mother-in-law Elaine, and my sister-in-law Kate.

Here's what we did (a.k.a. “Methods” section):

1. I gave everyone a verbal prompt, which was, off the top of my head, “With the rocks whirling in the flatlands, the daffodils...”
2. Each of us did a 15-minute freewrite (“Write whatever comes to mind, as fast as it comes to mind”).
3. Each of us passed our completed freewrite to the person on our left, who then read it through, underlining whatever words/phrases struck his or her particular fancy.
4. The underlined freewrites were then passed to the left again.
5. Each of us constructed a poem by rearranging, trimming, and punctuating the collection of underlined phrases that we'd been given by the person on our right.

Here are the four poems we created together in this manner (a.k.a. “Results” section):

I. (freewrite by Elaine, selection by Kate, poem by Tanya)

So happy to catch

the slight misfortune

of someone else:

a little vase set just so

in the sunshine,

the lacy edges of enlightenment

a blithe “meanwhile....”

Nothing to see, no dizzying jumble

out of the corner of an eye:

nowhere, whirling in circles.

II. (freewrite by Tyler, selection by Elaine, poem by Kate)

Humble wild eeps – mumble apologies

to maligned German tourists

in Brooklyn.

Let it speak for itself!

Don't choke on spaghetti squash and

peppercorns.

An inauthentic botanical,

not a Hollywood stunt double

or W. Bush,

so often happy to do it like

the day they were born.

Who really gets paid the BIG bucks

to engineer fruit adhesives

with your accent just so?

III. (freewrite by Tanya, selection by Tyler, poem by Elaine)

The flowers were all wall-flowers,

Sugar cubes of want, scattered grain,

Disuse and genteel paranoia,

That barren go-to wasteland:

Esplanades, rivulets, amulets,

Hocus-pocus postulates,

A heart-shaped socketwrench.

O molten lava yellow happiness,

Twirling up like a dervish devil-twister,

Self-satisfied and purple-sleek,

The bluebell of forgetfulness.

We have a bearskin rug and we never shave it!

IV. (freewrite by Kate, selection by Tanya, poem by Tyler)

Abandoned behind the peach,

the sun makes past loves or even current

into warm squash, the core that held the food.

Someone they once knew

made excuses but then forgot,

lolled about, snapped,

dressed a table beside meshy bulbs

and thin crystal with thin green necks,

as if to strip themselves,

snipped by silver,

wrought by a sweating palm.

Literary Sycophant

A few years ago, I was visiting a friend of mine in Rome. We were in the middle of a conversation when his phone rang. He glanced at his Caller ID.

“Mark Strand,” he said. “The machine will get it.”

I was dumbfounded. “Mark Strand?!” I repeated, almost as shocked as if it had been Tom Cruise or Oprah Winfrey on the line.

“Oh, he calls all the time,” said my friend. “I'll talk to him tomorrow. You were saying?”

Um...what was I saying?

“It is the moment to resist the onset / Of another average day, to beat the daylight / For exotic instances of this or that...”

No, wait, that's the beginning of a poem by Mark Strand. As in, The Guy Who Used to Be the Poet Laureate of the United States of America. Right up there with Rita Dove and Billy Collins. Like, wow.

It's kind of embarrassing to admit this, but I have groupie tendencies. Whenever I read something really good, I want to know all about the person who wrote it. Those “About the Author” blurbs were written with me in mind – except that they never dish as big a scoop as I want. Obsessively combing through the authorial thank-yous sometimes helps, especially when I recognize a name among the writer's acquaintance, but it's not as good as getting some really juicy gossip. Why oh why don't the supermarket tabloids ever feature scandals among the literati (and their hangers-on)? Oh, I suppose I could always hide in the author's shrubbery, high-powered binoculars in hand....

Star-struck name-dropper that I am, I get a real thrill out of being able to say that I know a few moderately famous writers – or, in some cases, knew them, before their tragic and untimely deaths.

For years, I had a crush on David Foster Wallace – which is why I recognized him the instant he appeared in Mary Karr's latest memoir. In her AA group, she meets a red-bandanna'ed genius who soon begins sending her yards-long missives, each meticulously footnoted. Karr coyly refers to him only as “David” throughout, but there's no one else it could be.

Never mind that David Foster Wallace was, in my sister's words, “a complete mess.”

Never mind that he was engaged, and I was married, and we lived in different cities.

Also never mind that I never so much as clapped eyes on the man at a book signing. I was still besotted. Not quite besotted enough to actually finish Infinite Jest, but I made it halfway through, and that's saying something.

Light bulbs, Dark bulbs, Tulip bulbs

Once you've got the knack of it, I'm betting that regular practice of freewriting – by “regular,” I mean at least 2-3 times a week – will produce insights (light bulbs), help you process the toxic junk of your past traumas and deal more creatively with your everyday troubles (dark bulbs), and bring you joy in the form of flowery little surprises (tulip bulbs).

My post “Fishing the River Styx” concluded with a brief jaunt through the tulip fields, but that freewrite also brought me other gifts.

The subconscious mind will sometimes blurt out truths that the conscious mind would rather avoid. This isn't always a comfortable experience, but I've certainly found it worthwhile to pay attention to what I have to say when I'm not really paying attention to what I say.

Here are some of the things I learned about myself from this morning's freewrite (although just what I'm supposed to do with these bits of subterranean wisdom, I'm not sure):

1. I seem to cry at the most opportune times, like in front of my computer screen

2. This is what always happens when the big draw is, “Here's someone I can make happy!”

3. The idea that writing can exist separately or be for public consumption, that's what sucks

4. If I am going to be a writer, I'm going to be embarrassing

5. Fishing in the subconscious...this is what comes up: a refusal to cooperate with the ego's schemata

Fishing the River Styx

I firmly believe in the freewrite. It's been the foundation of my own creative practice, insofar as I have a “practice.”

What is freewriting? Well, for anyone who wasn't forced to do this exercise by some zealous Language Arts teacher in junior high, it's when you take a pen to paper (that's right, you have to write longhand!), and you just keep writing down whatever comes into your head, not bothering to finish a sentence if some new thought (or bit of nonsense) elbows its way onto your page. You just keep going, and if you can't think of anything, you write, “I can't think of anything” until some different words show up. You stop when you get to a pre-determined number of pages, or when you've written for a certain length of time.

I like to freewrite for half an hour, preferably soon after waking in the morning.

I've read a lot of eloquent justifications for different methods of doing freewriting, which I don't feel like summarizing or adjudicating between, so I'm just going to leave it at this: however you choose to do it, freewriting is like fishing the Styx.

You never know what bizarre things you're going to dredge up from your subconcsious, but I can guarantee you it won't be the same-old, same-old. Except when it is, and that will tell you something, too.

Best of all, there are lots of nifty things you can do with these gifts from your subconscious mind. Without further ado, here's one:

After you're done freewriting, you can read over what you've put down, highlighter in hand, marking anything that jumps out at you. It might be a word, or an odd juxtaposition of images, or a phrase you really like. Then you rearrange these highlighted bits to make a poem. This is a type of “found” art: your subconscious gives you a bunch of random stuff to wade through; then you riffle through the junk to find some sparkly bits; then you make a word-collage out of what you've discovered on your page.

Here's what I highlighted in this morning's freewrite (arranged in the order the thoughts first appeared):

my thin blueberry skin, the frozen berry rasp of it

static & discomfit

camphor

plate I mean, rimmed with sugar

the swagger of the mind

I wish –

the spoon of lovingkindness

missives from beyond the barrier reef

scrunched-up

wiffle

I'm a peacock, really

How will I ever underline what seems relevant or sounds mighty?

Princess 'n' pea

impersonating myself

applique'd heart of calico

See, I even have painted fingernails!

face down in the lilies

keep yourself dry of it

your cracker crumbs of propriety

grandest gander

cringing smidgen

raucous outside

I'm looking for the Chinese fortune cookie, something that sounds good

I am a blueberry crumb

something to round out the beggar's meal

coming on a boat

the rosepetal I wanted for a bed

the pea-pod boat

appeal

pearls & paisley

autumnal death of the possible

holding it together with pieces

the voodoo doll of my attention

tenderly

Here are a couple of short poems I “found” in the list above:

I. I am a blueberry crumb,

a fortune cookie rimmed with sugar,

the spoon of lovingkindness –

something to round out the beggar's meal.

II. I'm a peacock, really,

raucous outside, in pearls and paisley,

my calico heart an appliqué.