Exploring On The Page and Otherwise, With a Bit of Mid-Winter Longing Thrown In

Three-Part Harmony

Ross Gale, a writer and creative consultant, just started his second online creativity series, "With Flames Upon Their Heads." He invited a group of writers to respond to the questions: What is the role of the creator? How does being a creator inform our work? Do you see yourself as co-creator? Re-creator? Gale describes the series as a "conversation, a meditation, and an inspiration."

My post went up last Monday, “Three-Part Harmony.” It’s a mini-essay and shows my thoughts about writing as creating, discovering creation, and participating in creation. I hope you’ll check out my post and all the others that are being posted daily for a couple weeks. Keep Ross’s blog bookmarked as you're sure to see lots of good things developing there in the future.

The first series, "Bereshit Bara," ran last summer with posts from 13 writers addressing the question of what triggers the first creative impulse. If you missed it, it's not too late to hear from Shannon Huffman Polson, David Clark, Adele Konyndk and others.

Reading Stack: The Prairie in Her Eyes

This book, with a cover the colors of autumn, caught my eye on a library table and I added it to my stack. Published by Milkweed Books (2001), The Prairie in Her Eyes by Ann Daum is part of its now gone “The World As Home” nonfiction series, which had been “dedicated to exploring our relationship to the natural world.”

Explore is what essays do best. Essays don’t teach. Although the reader of any essay, if it’s a good essay and if she’s a good reader, usually comes to the last sentence knowing more about the world and humankind than when she started. Essays don’t preach. Although the reader may certainly turn the last page only then to turn his life, or his thoughts or heart, in a new direction. Essays don’t give steps one through five for accomplishing anything, although they may sneak in tips, and certainly a reader may indeed accomplish something a result of reading an essay that he or she had never before considered.

I liked this collection of essays, and I like that Milkweed allows their nonfiction book chapters to be called essays if that is what they are. “Essay” is nearly a four-letter word these days in the publishing industry (yes, I know, essay is five letters). "They don’t sell; they’re too hard for the average reader; they aren’t immediately useful to the reader." Call the essay a chapter instead and hope the rose still smells as sweet. But I digress.

Daum’s essays are about growing up and living as an adult on a ranch in South Dakota. They are grounded in the world, in life, thingness, yet are about something bigger and universal, another mark of a good essay. Read them and you’ll be thinking about loss and grief, about courage, about returning to where you’re from but have never been as if coming home, about fear of death, nature’s beauty and cruelty, abundance and desperation. (Warning: there’s also gross chicken ranch stuff, which will make you only want to eat free-ranch chickens, if that.)

Daum’s tone is steady and calm, delivering no big epiphanies but lots of quiet ones, the best kind. One essay after another, Daum trusts the reader to take them as an offering, not to make them more or less than what they are--not a guide for living but a witness, a testimony.

Once the grass is up, all these mares will go to pasture, and then my evenings spread to include walking over prairie to inspect udders for any signs of milk or waxing. I love walking out to check the mares. In a wet year the prairie will be alive with frogs and locusts, nighthawks and meadowlarks. The grass stretches as far as I can see; farther. The mares move across the hills, even with their pregnant bellies, with the grace of wild things.

More On The “Essay”

If you’re interested in the essay as either a reader or a writer, you’ll want to know about Patrick Madden, a professor at Brigham Young University. He’s written a lovely book of essays called Quotidiana (University of Nebraska) and has a website by the same name, dedicated to the cultivation of the classic essay. I've heard him speak a couple times, the latest being at the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College last year. He’s very entertaining and full of knowledge about the history of the essay and its place in our current literary culture.

To add my support to the cause of the essay I may be more intentional about posting mini-reviews about essays and essay collections here in this space.

Final Word

This quote came at me from multiple directions this week. Because it fits the essay theme of the entries above, and because I always long for the sea, particularly a warm sea since it is now mid-winter, and have other land-locked friends that do as well, I'll share it here. It's attributed to Antoine de Saint Exupéry, author of the classic The Little Prince, as well as a wonderful memoir-in-essays, Wind, Sand and Stars.

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

~~~

I hope you can do some exploring this weekend, on paper or out in the world.

[Note: the photo is an extreme close-up of brush strokes from a painting of the sea by Vasili Nechitailo. Gorgeous, isn't it? I don't think there was a "no photography" sign up when I took it.]

Each day I discover...

“Each day I discover still more beautiful things; it’s enough to drive me mad. I want to do everything so much: my head is bursting from it.”

Claude Monet

~~~

Reading Annie Dillard: Living by Fiction

Annie Dillard is one of my literary heroes and that is the reason I pushed through Parts 1 and 2 of Living by Fiction (Harper Colophon, 1982) while reading it last weekend in a park under a blue sky. I knew if I did it would be worth it in the end. She would not disappoint. And let me say here, I do not place the blame for the necessity of "pushing" through the book's first two thirds at Annie’s feet. That portion of the book was about literary theory and critique, which somehow I missed in college while busying myself in biology and chemistry labs and have never quite caught up with since.

Part 3, in contrast, posits one of the biggest of all questions in its title, “Does the world have meaning?”, and as we approached those final sixty or so pages we were off on the kind of mind-expanding, soul-soaring stretches of prose that made her my hero in the first place back in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

“But what is knowledge if we cannot state it? If art objects quit the bounds of the known and make blurry feints at the unknown, can they truly add to knowledge or understanding? I think they can; for although we may never exhaust or locate precisely the phenomena they signify, we may nevertheless approximate them--and this, of course, is our position in relation to all knowledge and understanding. All our knowledge is partial and approximate; if we are to know electrons and chimpanzees less than perfectly, and call it good enough, we may as well understand phenomena like love and death, or art and freedom, imperfectly also."

Finding the way with words

Sunday mornings driving to church usually overlaps with the last half of Krista Tippett’s NPR radio show “On Being” (formerly, “Speaking of Faith,” a much finer name in my humble opinion), and we usually listen. So it did and we did last Sunday when she was interviewing Sarah Kaye, a 23-year-old spoken word poet and founder of Project V.O.I.C.E. (Vocal Outreach Into Creative Expression). Honestly, I hadn’t heard her before but loved the force of her voice and words, a force that was all the stronger due to her humility.  She talked about her work as not a set of answers but as a way of exploring and she invites her readers/listeners to join her in exploring.

Here’s an excerpt. I really resonated with what she says here because it speaks to the kind of writing I like to read. In fact, I may just have to borrow this defense for my own style in the book proposal for my current work in progress.  

“I write a poem when there's something I cannot navigate without poetry. And in doing so, when I put that poem out into the world, what I'm saying is, hey, look at me trying to figure this thing out, which I haven't yet, but this is me trying. If you're trying to figure this out too, maybe this can help you or maybe you can help me. And then maybe together we can make something make more sense than it does right now. I think that that's what it means to be human is to volunteer your experience in an effort to say, hey, this is what I've got. What do you have over there? Can we make something work here?”

Of course you have to trust the person with whom you’re walking beside in the figuring-out process, but so you also have to trust the person, even more so, who is telling you what to do in bulleted check lists. There are books I pick up because I want to learn something specific, to find out how to do something; there are other books I pick up because I want to walk alongside someone for awhile who is walking a path I’m either interested in or find myself on, and we can then think together for those 250 pages or so.

She read her stunning poem “Hiroshima,” which ends with: “These aren't the last words I'll share, but just in case, I am trying my hardest to get it right this time around.”

Here is a link to a TED talk that Kaye gave and to which they referred often in the interview (I haven’t watched yet): Sarah Kaye: If I Should Have a Daughter...

You can listen to the entire interview with Sarah Kaye here: Sarah Kaye's Way with Words.

~~~

Trains and travel

I recently rode a train somewhere, instead of driving, instead of flying. The train in the picture above is not the one I took but the train on the track outside my window. This picture doesn't do it justice but what a beauty it was. I love traveling by train because you have hours and hours to read,  look out the window, walk around, sit in the observation car, sleep, think, dream. No worries about weather or traffic. You have time to switch gears before you arrive at your destination, time to leave busyness behind; you have time to switch gears again before you arrive back home, back at work. I think I've posted this quote from Anne Morrow Lindbergh on this blog years ago but stepping on to a train pulls it up from my memory yet again.

“It is strange, but the minute I got on the train and left I felt utterly different. I think one’s feelings and thoughts, the real true deep ones, are better focused when you get away because they are detached from their stale associations: one’s desk and room and bed and mirror. They become clear and just themselves, the way colors of a sunset or a birch grove seen upside down become clearer, because the colors are disassociated from their familiar forms. Do you see what I mean?”

–Anne Morrow Lindbergh, from Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead

The Philosopher Kings

When I was in first grade, a boy in my class--whose name I remember but will withhold out of courtesy--threw up. He was sitting at his desk and out it came, all over the floor with a splash. The teacher managed the episode calmly and professionally, directing all of us, except the boy, to go out into the hallway, with half the class on either side, and sit single-file along the brick wall. The uniformed janitor then arrived and we all knew why. We next saw our teacher walk the sick boy down the hall toward the office, presumably to his waiting mother. 

It seemed a long while until the janitor emerged again. He walked through the middle of our group, pushing his industrial-sized metal bucket and mop. For some reason, his walk out of that room and down the hall, is one of my most vivid memories of grade school. I watched him and wondered if he had pictures of anyone in his wallet. I wondered if he was lonely. I wondered if when he left school at the end of the day whether anyone listened to what he had to say. I remember wondering those three things about him. That janitor, his walk and those questions, have continued to nudge themselves into my mind from time to time in all the years since.

This week I watched a documentary that caught my eye because it was about the inner lives of janitors. "The Philosopher Kings," released in 2009, films and interviews eight janitors who work in some of the most elite colleges and universities in America, including Stanford, Caltech, Princeton, Cornish College of the Arts, Cornell, University of Florida, Duke, and University of California Berkeley. It's a fascinating and moving documentary that reveals the challenges these eight have overcome in their lives, the dreams and goals they are pursuing, the sacrifices they make for others, what they learn from the institutions at which they work, and their significant inner wisdom.

The film is punctuated with a number of great quotes, including this one from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Do you think the porter and the cook have no anecdotes, no experiences, no wonders for you? The walls of their minds are scrawled all over with thoughts.

They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions."

Contest rules

One of the advantages of having unsorted stacks of papers around is that when you finally do go through them it is nearly like a treasure hunt. Who knows what might emerge from between an old magazine and a page of unclipped coupons?

Here is a recent find. A great quote from St. Basil:

So we must consider that a contest, the greatest of all contests, lies before us, for which we must do all things, and, in preparation for it, must strive to the best of our powers, and must associate with poets and writers of prose and orators and with all men from whom there is any prospect of benefit with reference to the care of our soul.

St. Basil