Moving Your Hand Across the Page

What is needed on mornings when you sit down to write but have no idea what to write is the simple movement of your hand across the page. Your fingers grip the pen. Up and down, up and down. Right to left and back again moves your hand. This is what writers do first and foremost: they move their pens across the page. Isn’t it true for most of us that we do motions of things over and over and nothing of note emerges, but over time or here and there in the routine movements evidence of the development of something wonderful emerges. The creation of a life, the care of other lives, an idea that changes the world in one of its teeny tiny corners, or helps a child, which indeed is changing the world. Who can know what a life faithful to its routine will affect?

~~~

[Photo: taken of stained glass window, made by the Mosaics Art Shops of Minneapolis, for the Merchant’s Bank in Winona, MN, designed in 1911 by William Purcell and George Elmslie.]

How to write a nature poem

My dear friend Jessica Brown and her husband Simon, recently made a short instructional video about how to write a nature poem: Seeing Eyes: How to Write a Nature Poem. Although they wrote it for a children's art festival, anyone, no matter their age, can enjoy and learn from it. The video is filmed in Ireland, where Jessica lives. I hope you'll watch it and maybe then write a poem! But even if you never write a poem, watching and listening to Jessica may inspire you to view the nature all around you differently, to have "seeing eyes."

~~~

[Photo: Nearby beauty]

Writing an Elevenie

In May I took an online writing class from Christine Valters Paintner, online Abbess of Abbey of the Arts and author of The Artist's Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom. She led those of us on the Zoom call through a series of writing exercises, and I want to share one with you because it was surprisingly easy and the yield satisfying. Paintner showed us how to write a 5-line, 11-word poem called an Elevenie (also called an Elfchen) by giving the prompt for each line followed by about 20 to 30 seconds to write that line.

Line 1 is one word that identifies an object, a thing. Line 2 is two words that answer the question, What does the word from Line 1 do? Line 3 is three words that answer the question, Where or how is the word from Line 1? Line 4 is four words that answer the question, What do you mean? Line 5 is one word that answers the question, What is the outcome? Of course, you can interpret these prompts fairly loosely.

Here's what I came up with:

Green
Joy tapped
Deep deep down
Life spirals up out
Dance

Maybe you will try it?

Pope Francis on hope

In an interview a number of years ago in America: The Jesuit Review, Pope Francis had this to say about hope:

"Christian hope is not a ghost and it does not deceive. It is a theological virtue and therefore, ultimately, a gift from God that cannot be reduced to optimism, which is only human. God does not mislead hope; God cannot deny himself. God is all promise."

I printed out this quote years ago, and it's lived on an index card in my box of project notes for my hope manuscript and sometimes on my actual desk top.

Maybe what is needed more than me continuing to try and finish my book about hope, which has been aiming at similar thoughts, is instead to copy this quote over and over again across 100 sheets of paper and call it done, trusting that the repetition of the thoughts would allow them to sink in and do their work in readers.

Tempting as that thought is, I'm continuing to plug along.

~~~

For an interesting coincidence, see the next post for something more from Pope Francis.

~~~

[Photo: taken of the sunset the other night. No touch up or filters.]

Everything Far Becomes Near: A New Poetry Chapbook by a Dear Friend

Ann Conway, a writer currently living in Pittsburgh, has been my dear friend for more than 15 years. We first met in a writing workshop in Santa Fe, both of us trying to navigate a working life and a writing life. She has recently released a chapbook of poetry, Everything Far Becomes Near (Finch & Fellow). Here is one poem, among many between the book’s covers, that stunned me into silence, quickening my spirit.

Hearing Test

Once I dreaded you,
all I could not hear,
the long pauses indicating failure.
But inside the grey padded booth,
I am amphibious,
My chambered heart thudding
as I listen to a symphony of sonar:
small beeps
far away trumpets and bumps
some imagined, most not.
I listen as hard to what I hear
as I did when a child at Scarborough Beach,
lying with ear to sand
that I knew was full of sea water,
all I loved and dreaded most.
In a world muted between beach and breeze,
I heard a whale call miles beyond the undertow.
I sensed his questing eye,
his barnacled heft
a citizen of the maplessness
where I have always longed to live,
in the country without test
that of Ysma’el, meaning
”God harkens, listens.”

Your Creativity Archive

I recently read a post on Austin Kleon’s blog, “The Garden Where Ideas Grow,” that I found encouraging and even life-giving. For those of you who don’t know of Kleon, he writes about creativity and is the author of several books, most recently Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad. The blog post spoke of creativity as being like gardening, which rang true for me even though I’m not a gardener, in the literal dig-in-the dirt sense of the word. Each of us has notes for some creative idea planted in a number of places, such as emails or letters, journal pages, new project files, the margins of books, blog posts, and so on, and these seeds don’t go anywhere while they’re in those places. But then—and often rather out of the blue, because you didn’t realize at the time when you wrote these notes or phrases that you were really planting seeds—a moment comes and you’re surprised to see something germinate and push toward the light, and you realize then that all this time that seed had been growing tender roots. I discovered that this week with something I had worked on over 3 years ago.

I had been reading Dancing on the Head of A Pen by Robert Benson, and he wrote about how he writes 600 words every morning related to an emerging project and uses the rest of the day, all of the rest of the day, to work on projects that are further along or market the ones that are already out in the world. As I read it I thought how wonderful and wise, that this is how the work gets done, but the next day as I got ready to start my day job, I felt nearly upset at what I’d read because it so clearly leaves out someone like me, and perhaps you, who has to give so much to other things like earning a living. Then I remembered the little project from 3 years ago, and it clicked together in my brain with the Kleon blog post about creativity being like gardening and the clue from Benson of giving a certain number of words per day to something new, and so now something new is slowly growing and in a fun way, come what may from it.

I mention this because maybe it will cause you to think of something you started once upon a while and to wonder whether roots have yet formed hidden.

~~

Related posts:

• Beyond Work

• One Lifetime Isn’t Long Enough

• Writing From A Messy Room

~~

[Photo: Dusk, the evening after summer solstice, at one of Minneapolis’s beautiful lakes.]

A New Venture

This blog space has been quiet the last several months. At the turn of the year, now already more than 5 months ago, I had planned to pull back from writing here for a time so as to devote more time, in the already too few hours unclaimed by work and other commitments, to moving along my manuscript on hope, which already has taken way too long. But just as that plan was made, I found out that Kalos Press, the publisher of Finding Livelihood, my book that came out in 2015, had gone out of business.

While I was still absorbing this news, grieving it actually, and wondering what to do, the book's editor, Jessica Snell, emailed me to say that she and the book's designer, Valerie Bost, were on board to help me republish it if that's what I wanted to do.

Republish it?

I hadn't even gotten that far in my thinking yet. But, yes, I did want to republish it. I think this book still has some good to do in the world. My new publishing venture, Metaxu Press, was born!

Instead of having a next draft of my hope manuscript to show for these months of silence, I now have a second edition of Finding Livelihood. I've been learning about copyright law, and the Library of Congress, and business structures, and book distributors, and pricing models, and printing options. Thankfully, I didn't have to also learn about book design because Valerie allowed me to use again the same cover design and, slightly modified, inside design (did you know that a book's cover and inside design belong to the designer?).

Valerie also designed a new logo, which I love. Whether I publish anything else through this new press in the future, I can't say for sure, but it's been a fun process. So maybe I will?

The new edition of Finding Livelihood is now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online booksellers. Kindle and Nook versions too, although the Kindle version hasn't loaded yet for some reason.

You can also order it from Hearts & Minds Books and Eighth Day Books. If you live in Minneapolis, you can buy it at Milkweed Books or Magers & Quinn. If you live in St. Paul, you can buy it at Next Chapter Booksellers (formerly Common Good Books). No matter where you live, you can ask for it from your local bookstore and they can order it.

All books need some help, even second editions finding their own way out into the world. If you wanted to help this one along—and if you did I'd be ever so grateful—here are some ideas:

• Post something on social media, such as an excerpt from it or just a word about it

• Order it from your local bookstore or ask them to stock it

• Ask your library to order it (this is surprisingly easy to do)

• Write an Amazon review

• Buy a copy for a friend or for your church library

Thank you for being here and reading along. I promise I'll get some new content up before too long.

~~~

[photo: taken of the Lilies of the Valley in my yard. It was such a long winter here; the appearance of these triggered a surge of joy.]